“The letter was astonishing, but so were the whole four days,” Lorna writes to her friend Tracy in London. “We were the most unlikely traveling companions, three mismatched, but oddly complimentary women.”  She wants to explain the surprises and frustrations and hilarity and trauma and delight of their time at Coral Villas.  But how to begin?

Lorna rocks on the deck of her compact “demi-villa” sipping a pleasantly bitter, cold Bintang beer.  She makes out two mountains across the Lombok Strait in Bali.  Are they volcanic like so much of this shape-shifting country?  The call to prayer is slowly whirling to conclusion.  Now, from a neighboring garden: peeping birdsong and lowing water buffalo.

“Paradise,” had laughed to her friend.  “What the hell are you supposed to do in Paradise?”

Tracy said, “Find a lover.  Climb a mountain.  Be adventurous.  For godsake, take a break from your bloody books.”

Lorna’s other friends agreed.

“You work too hard.”

“Take a rest.”

“Unwind and explore.”

So after three weeks in the archives and lecture halls of Java, she’s flown to Lombok, a sultry island where she can see Bali, but where the local beach has fewer sunburned tourist bellies.  Lorna’s grandparents came from Madagascar.  Her own field—some would say her expertise—is the ancient trade routes and migrations between Indonesia and the Malagasy world.  She loves the yellowing records, the musty, fabric thick covers of ships’ logs, the curious stains on the paper of antique diaries.  She’s most at home in the “there” and the “then,” in currents of long ago.

Friendship is important to the good life, her grandmother used to tell her.  But Lorna’s passion is work.  Lovers have come and gone; no one wanted to share her with the archives.  Now at forty-five, Lorna has given up on an enduring lover.

She inhales, noticing the fragrances of saltwater, tropical flowers and some garlicky dish from the café below.  “The café, Tracy, it all began at the café.”

*

Monday

The beachside restaurant is empty except for a handsome older white woman sitting erectly at the adjacent table.  Lorna nods.

The woman smiles wanly.

Lorna scans the menu, glances at the beach where French and German tourists recline on red striped chaise lounges.  Lombok men entice tourists with snorkeling flyers.  One woman offers massages.  Another sells gaudy towels.  Finding few takers, the vendors wander down toward the cheaper hotels.

She sips a glass of the outrageously priced wine and waits for her meal.

The white woman is also waiting.

Lorna admires the stranger’s taupe linen sundress, the pale green cardigan shrugged over her shoulders.  Her own loose cotton shirt and pants make her feel slapdash.  Suddenly, she hears herself inquiring, “Is this your first visit to Lombok?”

“My fifth.”  A tart Australian accent.  “I used to come with my husband.  He died last year.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

She nods, then brightens slightly.  “It’s as beautiful as ever.”

“I’m dining alone tonight,” Lorna says by way of invitation.

“Me too.  I usually sit at your table.  Somehow they lost my reservation.”

Lorna realizes she’s feeling a little lonely and tries a final time.  “Would you care to join me?  You’d have a better view from here.”

“That might be nice.  Thank you.”  She slides over on the bench.

“Lorna.” She extends her hand.

“Celeste.”  The woman tents her palms in Namaste, bowing.

Lorna blinks, wonders if she gargled today.  No, no.  It’s the woman’s acute physical reserve.  Lorna feels positively easy-going in comparison.

Celeste likes to talk.  She comes from Melbourne, fourth generation of Irish prisoner stock, quite fashionable now, she laughs.  Her husband Roland was a merchant banker.  After the boys grew up, she and Roland took early retirement to enjoy his hard-earned money.

“You’re from here, then?” asks Celeste?

Even locals assume she’s from Java.  A prodigal daughter with an English accent.  Such welcoming people, they also call Barak Obama Indonesian.  Actually, she has the same coloring as the American president, a complexion that blends in easily here.  As a scholar, she’s learned Grandpa’s stories about Indonesians settling his part of Madagascar are true.  As a kid she paid little attention.  Back home in multi-culti London, she’s clearly “of color” but few people ask specifics.

“No, I’m English.”

“Yes, the accent,” Celeste’s Australian twang broadens.  “But…” she reddens.

“My four grandparents emigrated from Madagascar to Kenya with their vanilla plants.   Mum and Dad immigrated to London under the ‘right of abode’ provision.’”  She’s told the story to puzzled colleagues all over Indonesia, most of whom nod comprehendingly because they know about the trade routes.  Celeste, however, looks more baffled than ever.

As Neela serves their meals, fish stew for Celeste and calamari for her, Lorna studies her companion’s face.  Late sixties at most, she guesses, only about twenty years older than herself.  Yet chic women with such bearing seem from a bygone era.

Her ruminations are interrupted by a broad, American voice.

“Mind if I perch here a sec?” The Asian woman with the sunny blond hair asks breathlessly.  “I’m Rosie.”

Celeste glances curiously, almost clinically, as if awaiting an explanation.

Rosie accommodates.  “See that massive German over there.  He’s been shadowing me all afternoon.  ‘Does Fräulein wish to walk on the beach?  Welcome to my room for a drink.  Please join me for dinner?’  Sheesh.  My colleagues swore the Villas were cool for single women.  She grips the table’s edge, trembling.  “He’s starting to freak me out.”

“Welcome.”  Lorna smiles at the pretty young woman—Japanese American?—with the intelligent eyes, diamond nose stud and flamboyantly spiked yellow hair.  Her trim figure is disclosed to excellent effect in a skimpy pink halter top and tight shorts.  This is a beach resort, Lorna reminds herself.  Now, across from Rosie, she’s transformed from the young frump into the prim auntie.

“Do join us,” Celeste says kindly.  “We’re each dining alone.”

Clearly puzzled by the comment, Rosie doesn’t question her temporary refuge.  “I’m Rosie Hongo, just here a few days.  Or not.  If Lothario persists, I’ll escape back to Jakarta.”

“You live in Jakarta?” asks Lorna.

“I work for the U.S. Embassy.  Minor, minor post.  I put in for Indonesia because I wanted to see Kalimantan, Papua, the Flores Islands, but I’ve been stuck in the Jakarta office all year.  Weird place.  Poverty everywhere, yet the city center is crammed with five star hotels and malls splashed with Max Mara, Harvey Nicks, Dona Karan.  Nutso traffic.  L.A. without the good flicks.

“I’m Lorna and this is Celeste.”

“In every city, say Delhi, one just needs to know where to look,” Celeste finishes her wine and signals Neela for another glass. 

Neela takes Rosie’s dinner order.

In Celeste’s portentousness Lorna recognizes something of her own discomfort, an inadvertent haughtiness born of vulnerability.

“My last posting was Delhi.”  Rosie sounds nostalgic.  “I’d give anything to be back.  When were you there?”

“My husband died in India this past October.”  Celeste looks out toward the bright lamps of the bobbing fishing boats.

Lorna follows her gaze.  These deck lamps are tiny stars blinking in the sea.

Celeste composes herself and continues, “Roland was cremated in Udaipur.”

Rosie blinks.

“That must have been so hard,” Lorna murmurs.

“Hardest for my sons, who…” she loses her train of thought.          

 Lorna’s still taking in Celeste’s loss.

 Both Douglas and Arthur were pallbearers.  Douglas, as elder, lit the pyre.”

“Heartbreaking.”  Rose nods.

“Yes.”  Lorna reaches out, but the woman withdraws her hand before they touch.

Rosie’s voice softens.  “Sometimes I work with bereaved families.  And you did the right thing.  Cremation is the least painful way to take a loved one home.”

“Oh, Roland didn’t go home.  He was a traveler at heart.  I am carrying on for both of us.  The boys and I scattered his ashes in Pushkar Lake.  So many good people there—Gandhi, Nehru.  Roland would have wanted that.”

Good people, Lorna muses: major figures in Indian history.  Celeste doesn’t mean to be pretentious.  They’re each flustered in this new place.  She craves a glass of the overpriced wine.

Catching Lorna’s bewildered expression, Rosie says, “So we each wound up in this Eden alone.”  She turns to her subdued companion.  “What brought you here, Lorna?”

 “Archives.  And a few lectures on early trade routes from Indonesia to Africa and India.”

  “Yeah,” Rosie blushes.  “Isn’t it cool—this entire world of culture and commerce existed before the Euros got on their boats.  And they think they brought us civilization.”

 Celeste gets something in her eye and pulls out a mother of pearl mirror.

 “So what are you?”  Rosie persists.  “A geographer?  Historian?”

Americans are so direct, something she admires, yet finds faintly abrupt.  Most people outside the academy don’t get past her one sentence potted research description.  “Interdisciplinary post-colonial studies.”

“Dope.” Rosie grins.

“Students earn degrees in that?”  Celeste’s eyebrows lift.

“It’s a graduate focus.”

Neela serves Rosie’s Very Veggie Napoleon.

Glancing into the darkening night, Lorna notices the sunbathers have disappeared.  Some have metamorphosed as diners in the now crowded restaurant.

Celeste turns to Rosie.  “What drew you to the Foreign Service?”

She shrugs.  “I longed to see the world and didn’t want to join the Marines.”

Lorna laughs.

“To be honest, I used to have grand ideas about bringing peoples together.”

“But now?”  Celeste tilts her head.

“I don’t know.  It’s easy to get discouraged, even cynical.  Everybody wants something.  Visas, work permits, green cards, scholarships.  In and out of the office.  Oh, I do have some great Indonesian buddies.  Super people.  It’s a lucky life, but the day to day job…”

Lorna likes Rosie.  Imagines they might be friends if she lived in London.

“Since you’re familiar with Lombok,” Lorna asks Celeste, “Can you tell me what to see?  I heard about a weaving village.  And a fishing beach at Ampenan.”

Celeste smiles.  “Both excellent.  You can hire a car at the front desk.”

“Hey,” Rosie says, “Lorna, want to do that tomorrow?  Together?”

“I’d love to.”

“Good, we’ll make a great duo.”  Rosie beams.

Celeste signals for another glass of Sancerre. 

They fall silent, waiting for Neela.

“I wonder if I might join the expedition?” asks Celeste.  “It’s been ages since Roland and I visited those little villages.”

“Of course,” agrees Lorna before she sees Rosie lower her eyes.

“Fine,” Celeste addresses Lorna.  “We’ll ask for Amin.”

“Amin it is.”  Rosie brightens.  “Thanks for the sanctuary from Hans.  I’ll skip dessert because I’m kind of wiped.”  She folds rupiahs and tucks them under her plate.

 

Back at the demi-villa, Lorna slips into a nightgown and surveys her posh room.  Accustomed to rudimentary university guest houses, she can’t believe the opulence of this four star resort.  Even though Tracy found her a deal online.  For the first time in years, she feels like a foreigner in Indonesia.

She pulls a Bintang from the mini-fridge.  It’s refreshing, alcoholic and five times cheaper than the wine.

Her sheet is turned down—what a bizarre custom—and the room reeks of fresh pesticide.  Better than malaria.  She’s grateful for the ceiling fan cutting through the evening’s thick humidity.  Finally, she slides into bed with her novel, an endless Richard Russo that Tracy said was funny.

This holiday is like a train journey, Lorna tells herself.  She’s heard great stories traveling across England, India, Malaysia.  Meeting people, opening up, then disappearing forever.

The Bintang is empty and she hasn’t turned a page of the book.

*

Tuesday

Rosie is waiting at the front desk when Lorna arrives.

“Sorry about last night; I got the feeling that you’re not keen on Celeste joining us.”

 Rosie smiles ruefully.  “Well, it was the polite move—to invite her.   Very English.”

 Lorna shrugs.

“It’ll be fine.  It’s just that I deal with rich expats all the time.  They ‘know how to do’ India or Korea or wherever.  Guess I thought the two of us together would have more fun.”

Fun, yes, Lorna considers; she’s right.

Celeste and Amin appear from different directions.

The short, alert man in his thirties greets Celeste with a small bow.  “Ibu, welcome back.”

Celeste sits in the taxi’s front seat, clearly her place.  Rosie and Lorna climb in the back.

Just past the hotels, touristy cafés and batik shops, they’re deep in countryside.  Blue sky, blue sea, green, green farmland, and a shore trimmed with palms, high grass, tropical plants.  Lorna can’t name half the flowers.  She’s realizing, day by day, that despite years of studying the archipelago’s history, despite her close Indonesian colleagues, she doesn’t know much about daily life here today.

“We’re lucky to arrive after the rains,” Celeste explains.  “By high season, this thirsty land drains to brown.  Now we have the best of both worlds, dry and green.”

Lorna recalls last week’s lecture in Malang, her voice straining against the shrill thunder.

Soon they’re overtaking horse carts crammed with people holding unweildy bundles.  Amin deftly weaves around bicycles.  Now: an invasion of motorcycles.  Vroom.  Vroom.  Sooty exhaust thickens the hot morning.  Her colleague Aliv, claims the motorcycle is Indonesia’s national animal.

Next week, Celeste declares, she’ll travel to a small village in Thailand, “the sweetest little hotel on a lagoon.”  Then it’s on to Jaipur, Udaipur and of course Pushkar.  She doesn’t spend much time in Melbourne these days.  “Dull as dishwater without Roland,” she groans.  “I’m lucky to have friends all over the world inviting me to visit.”

On the roadside, people dry brown rice for mills which strip the nutritious skin and produce white rice.  For years Lorna assumed this bad habit was inherited from Europeans for whom white was the optimum color.  Then she learned indigenous people had shucked rice for centuries.  So much for her post-colonial theory.

Suddenly, Amin pulls into the village of Sukara, a collection of small houses constructed of woven grass and tiled roofs.

“Amin will find us a local guide,” Celeste explains, glancing around.

A young woman walks in their direction.

“Oh, look, it’s Indri, the girl we had three years ago.”  She lowers her voice.  “Hard to believe she has three children, isn’t it?”  She gazes expectantly at the young woman.

Indri extends her hand.  “Welcome to our village.  May I show you around?”

Celeste smiles thinly, steps back and tents her palms.

Lorna remembers Celeste doesn’t shake hands and wonders if she’s disappointed that their host doesn’t recognize her.

Rosie pumps Indri’s hand.  “I’m Rosie.  This is Lorna and Celeste.”

“Americans!” she declares in a polyglot accent.

“Nope,” chuckles Rosie.  “A mini United Nations here.  Lorna is English.  Celeste is Australian.  I’m American.”

Indri nods blankly, then offers a few details about the village and her family.  The pretty young woman—eighteen or nineteen at most, Lorna surmises—parts her glossy black hair in the middle and secures it with a plastic flower barrette.  Her gold-green batik sarong is accented by a pink Garfield t-shirt.  She looks younger than Lorna’s students—which she is—not like the mother of three kids.

They follow Indri through a gaggle of ducks.  “We use them for eggs; sometimes for meat.”

The sweet aroma of cow dung envelops this neighborhood of small, neat houses.  An open door reveals three chairs, a simple table and straw floor mats.

Lorna wonders, if her grandparents hadn’t emigrated from Madagascar, would she be living like this?

Indri stops at a home where the veranda is larger than the house.  In one corner of the porch a young woman holding baby in one arm, weaves with her other.   A gleaming green and yellow cloth with the occasional strand of pink.  In the far corner, a grandmother swirls newly spun thread into skeins.  The weaver’s mother chats with a neighbor rocking another baby.

Who’s watching whom? Lorna wonders.

“You try now,” Indri invites them to work the loom.

The women regard one another.

“I’ll give it a shot,” Rosie laughs.  She slips off her sandals, steps on the porch.

The weaver’s mother—a round woman in her thirties—pinches Rosie’s arm, murmuring approval.

Indri translates.  “Very white,” she is saying.

“Whatever.”  Rosie looks chagrined.

She carefully steers a stick back and forth through the radiant threads.

With each row, the older woman raises her right thumb in approval.

Lorna and Celeste click pictures.

“Terima Kasih.”  Rosie stands, bowing to the weaver and her family, who wave as Indri leads the group back toward the village center.

Two boys are chasing puppies down the road.  “Pergi!  Pergi!”

Lorna tightens, aware of the Islamic proscription against touching dogs.

Indri looks intensely relieved as the dogs scamper into the bush.

Rosie starts to tear up.

Celeste strides ahead with Indri.

“Sorry,” Rosie sniffs, “My own little mutt just died.  I found Kutta in Delhi five years ago.  Last month he got cancer and…I guess he’s one reason I’m here.  I couldn’t stand to be in the flat alone.”

“I’m so sorry.”  Lorna puts her hand on the younger woman’s shoulder.  “My cat Mimi has been with me eight years.”

“Thanks.  People think, ‘just a pet.’  But Kutta was my pal.  Made me laugh every day.”

“Welcome to our showroom,” Indri leads them into a small concrete building.

The village cooperative boasts shelves and shelves of  folded ikat, batiks and weavings.

“Would the ladies like to try on traditional costumes?”

Rosie and Lorna demur.

“Oh, come, come,” Celeste chides.  “It’s expected.  Yes, Indri, by all means, please.”

Celeste reappears, gaudily draped in chartreuse and gold.

Rosie blinks.

“Would you like a photo?”  Lorna asks tentatively.

“Why, of course,” trills Celeste.  Turning to Indri, she asks, “May I try this?  The whole outfit and that one in purple, please.”

Indri smiles for the first time that morning.

Nodding approval at his passenger’s packages, Amin opens the car doors.

Lorna hopes he gets a cut.

Back on the main road, Celeste twists toward the back seat.  “Sukara girls marry young and don’t use birth control.  Most have six or seven children.  All villagers share in the store profits.  In an odd way tourists help revive and foster traditional weaving.”

Lorna knows this, but she’s never really done the tourist thing like this.  The shawl she bought for Tracy is nothing compared with Celeste’s munificent purchases.

Back to Coral Villas, Celeste showers before her massage.  Rosie investigates snorkeling gear and Lorna plans to spend the afternoon swimming laps in the pool, resting, absorbing the visit to Sukara.  Perhaps one thing you do in Paradise, she thinks, is pay attention.

*

Wednesday

Each woman settles into her appointed seat.  Amin drives them down the coast to Ampenan, a storied fishing village.

Rosie leans forward, speaking slowly and clearly.  “Do you have a family, Amin?”

“Yes, my wife and I have a son and a daughter and we all live with my mother.”

“Busy home,” Lorna says.  Although she misses her mother, she could never live with such a fiercely opinionated person.

“I would like to build a house of our own.  Yet that is very expensive.”

“I imagine.”  She recalls yesterday’s story about his route from dishwasher to waiter and, when his English improved, his coveted ascension to driver and guide.

“But soon the international airport comes and brings more work.”  He nods.

“A disaster!” Celeste claps her hands.  “Lombok will change immeasurably.  It may be good for people’s pocketbooks, yes.  But a catastrophe for our quiet paradise.”

“Whose paradise?”  Rosie clearly she can’t help herself.

“My dear, you must understand the seclusion enhances Lombok’s appeal.”

“But more tourists will come when they can fly directly from Europe, the Americas, Africa, other parts of Asia…”

“Yes,” Amin says to Rosie in the rear-view mirror.  “More jobs.  Many more.”

Celeste is speaking to the windshield.  “Those tourists will stay in ghastly high rise hotels.  A completely different class of people.”

“It will bring income.”  Rosie says flatly.

Lorna knows her own sadness about modernization of these ancient islands is an academic indulgence.

Amin parks at a small, congested port.  Blue and white boats bobble close to shore; container ships float further out to sea.  Two men repair nets, talking and laughing.  Nearby, a clutch of silent bare-headed women in t-shirts and sarongs squat around baskets, curing tuna.

Lorna takes a long breath of salty air.  Being present in this every day island scene makes her research feel more and less real.  People have fished here for millennia.  They’ve sailed in and out of the archipelago to remote ports, recording many of the journeys in her cherished yellowing logs.    Yet today the fish and the ports are different.  Technology has totally transformed navigation and record keeping.

On the drive to their next site, Lorna contemplates the green rimmed coast and the calm turquoise sea.  A world apart from the turbulent waters around her own chilly Albion.

Today, Lorna joins Celeste at the massage spa.  If you don’t get a massage in paradise, where will you get one?  She hears Tracy’s voice.

Muhri, a quiet, self-contained man, points Lorna to the dressing room where she finds a robe and a pair of black plastic panties.  Baffled at first, she then realizes the color will show through the white sheet.  A compromise between Koranic taboo and resort capitalism.

Muhri’s touch is gentle and assured.  Soon she’s inhaling a dozen tropical perfumes from the oil he rubs into her shoulders.  Half-listening to the dulcet gamelan music, she dozes.

At 6pm, a ridiculously relaxed Lorna floats downstairs to the restaurant.

Tonight, Celeste sits at the view table.

Lorna considers the divergent worlds of her two acquaintances.  Celeste grew up in the bush, the first person in her family to finish high school.  She found unexpected success at college.  Ten years later, she left an auspicious sculpture career to marry Roland, and founded a charity to send at-risk youth to art school.

About Rosie, she’s discovered the imp was a Rhodes Scholar and speaks twelve languages.  She’s torn about her State Department career, mundane now, but promising.  How long can she stay if they discover she’s a lesbian?  Well, she’s not sure of her sexuality but wishes her boss would stop asking pointedly about boyfriends.

Lorna hates the tension between the two women.  Rosie distrusts Celeste’s assured declamations and Celeste is uncomfortable with Rosie’s rough edges.  Once again, as with her parents and then her colleagues, Lorna is right in the middle.  Not the best spot for chilling out.  Lorna reminds herself to think about the train.  Stories remain; people vanish.  She likes these very different women, feels sad and relieved that they’ll soon disappear.

“So, my dear, what did you think of Muhri’s massage?”

“Completely revitalizing,” Lorna admits.  “I haven’t had a massage in years.”

“Truly?”  Celeste is astonished.  “There are spas all over London.  I recommend a superb place in Belsize Park right near you.”

“Murhi took his job so seriously,” Lorna smiles, “as if it were a sacrament or something.”

“But it is.  It is!” cries Celeste.  “Have some wine.  I bought a bottle to celebrate.”

“Celebrate?”

“Our little trio.  You simply don’t know what you’ve done for my spirits.  Thank you for breaking through the gruff reserved that first night.  I do apologize.”

“Not at all,” Lorna protests, embarrassed.  “Is Rosie back from snorkeling?”

“Snorkeling?”  Celeste is alarmed.  “Alone?”  Where?  No one told me.”

Taking a long sip of the refreshing wine, Lorna answers, “Gili?  Gully?”

“Oh, not the Gilis!”  Celeste is shaken.

“Neela.”  She waves to the waitress, then pivots back to Lorna.  “We must ask the staff if she returned safely.”

“What’s wrong with the Gilis?  I read they were a popular beach with families.”

“The Gili Islands are vile spots off the Southwest coast.  Men hang out there.  Oh, god, she went by herself, didn’t she?”

“No.  Of course Amin drove her.  And he was supposed to collect her at five.  I bet they’re just delayed on the road.”  Lorna reminds herself Rosie is a taekwondo black belt.

“Yes, Ibu?”  Neela appears.

“Dear, please ask reception if Ibu Rosie has returned from those dreadful Gilis?”

“Certainly.”

Lorna detects a faint smile on Neela’s face.

Celeste is shaking her head.  “Perhaps she’s upstairs showering.  She’s not the promptest person.”

Lorna dwells on the dramatically shifting sky, on the sun setting over the nearby Bali mountains.  Indonesia is so fierce and unpredictable compared to her docile English countryside.  The moon fills in from the opposite side down here.  The sky lights up with different constellations.  Yet these are the very stars under which her grandparents slept in Madagascar.  Drawn as she is to this place, she knows she couldn’t live in a world lacking the simple Northern pleasures of lavender and early autumn pears.

They each sip wine in silence.

“You guys look glum!”  Rosie drops into a chair.  “Disastrous massages?”

“Oh,” Celeste claps a hand over her heart.  “You had us, well, me, in quite a panic.”

Rosie, whose wet hair is flatter and darker than usual, seems bewildered.

Lorna thinks she looks prettier without the spikes and realizes Rosie’s mother probably agrees with her.  God, when did she become such a fuddy-duddy?

“Traipsing off to those remote islands alone.”  Celeste can’t let it go.

“The Gilis are pretty close,” says Rosie. “So sad about the coral.  Getting damaged by sea level rise and local sewage.”

Celeste offers wine.  “But you were all alone.”

“I had plenty of company.  A Belgian couple and a family from Malaysia were snorkeling on the same beach.”  She pours a glass of wine, savors the first sip with her eyes closed.  “But hey, it was nice of you to worry.”

Celeste bursts out laughing.  Lorna finds herself giggling.  Rosie joins in.  Around the café, heads turn toward the jolly women.

*

Thursday

“Our last morning!” Celeste laments from the front seat.  “It’s a shame I have foot reflexology at two because we could explore the other side of the island.  Sembalun is a sweet mountain village.  Next time!  Roland always says, said, ‘You have to leave something for your return.’  We’ll save Sembalun for our next visit.”

Rosie whispers to Lorna, “Does she think we’ve joined her Explorer Troop?”

Lorna clears her throat.  She, too, is growing a little weary of Captain Celeste.  Gazing out the window she watches children walking to school in pressed beige uniforms.  Many girls wear what they call the jilbab.  How do they bear the heat?

“Here we are,” announces Amin.  “Lingsar, ladies.”

Their guide, Wayang, a thin man from Bali, points out two separate sites—one for the Islamic and Animist Sasaks and one for Hindus.  “The holy eels swim at this shrine for Lord Vishnu.  They can be enticed to the surface for a boiled egg.”

Celeste blanches.  “You two go ahead.  Roland once lured them and I reckon you’d call them fascinating creatures.”

“Thanks.”  Rosie pops a tic tac.  “But I don’t want eels swimming in my dreams tonight.”

Unfazed, Wayang guides them through the holy site, paying particular attention to the impressively large rocks pilgrims reverently lug here from Mount Rinjani.

Amin taps his foot impatiently beside the car.  Holding the door for Celeste, he asks, “When is your appointment, Ibu?  Do we still go to Narmada?”

“We must, of course.”  She turns toward the others, “Oh, this gem of a park lined by waterways, dotted with lakes and Cambodia trees, was designed in the 1700s…”

“Pardon,” Lorna interrupts, “but Amin is right.  Don’t you have a 2pm appointment?”

Celeste opens her pendant watch.  “I had no idea.  Thanks Lorna dear, for the reminder.”

How can the woman be so sensitive to local customs one moment and so imperious to Amin the next?  Remember the train journey, Lorna.

Amin makes good time until he hits the village of Sengiggi, where the road is jammed with trucks, buses and motorcycles.

“Can’t you hurry?”  Celeste frets.

“Ibu, I must be careful.”  His voice is gentle, but authoritative.

“Do just scoot around that bus,” Celeste demands.

“People on the road,” he answers coolly.

“God knows how long it will stand there!”

Amin hunches over the steering wheel, steps on the gas.

“Oh, no,” Rosie calls out.  “There’s a little dog. Amin, Amin!  Watch out!”

Lorna sees a clumsy black puppy dodging traffic.

“Right here,” Rosie is shouting, “in the road.”

Lorna hears a thud and knows they’ve hit the dog.

Now she sees the puppy slumped down, dark red blood seeping from its scar of a mouth.

Rosie throws open the door of the moving car, leaps out.

“Careful!” Celeste reaches for and misses Rosie’s hand.

Amin screeches to a stop.

Celeste calls, “Rosie! Watch the motorcycles.  Oh, Rosie!”

“Help.  Help!” Rosie cries.  “Amin.  Amin, we need to get him to a veterinarian.”

Tourists and locals gape from the sidewalk.

Lorna rushes out after Rosie, directs traffic around her friend, the dog and the stalled taxi.  Oh, damn, passionate, dog-loving Rosie.  She can’t leave her out here amidst the swerving, squealing vehicles.  She hears Celeste sobbing.

“Amin, please!” howls Rosie.  “Help us!  Please!”

He steps out reluctantly.  “I am sorry, Ibu.  I cannot assist.”  He shakes his head sadly, keeping a distance.  “Dogs are unclean and haram.”

“Please.”  Tears stream down Rosie’s red cheeks.

Amin looks more uncertain than resistant.

“Please!”

He stands, paralyzed.

Lorna sees Celeste has collapsed against the door, trembling, her eyes squeezed shut.

“Look, he’s hemorrhaging.”

His face frozen, Amin returns to the car.

As he steps on the gas, Celeste is sobbing again, her head between her hands.

Deftly, Amin weaves through the congested street.

Lorna watches until they turn the corner, out of sight.

Rosie screams, “She’s going with him.  For a massage!  Can you believe it?”

Lorna says evenly, “We’ll flag down another car.”  She learned this calm, this practice of “behaving as if” from her grandmother.  People think she’s serene; she’s simply learned to postpone terror.

“It’s all her fault.”  Rosie’s voice is panicky. She sniffs back tears, stroking the dog.

“Accident,” Lorna thinks the word was coined for this situation, but she can’t say that to Rosie.  Instead, she waves to advancing vehicles.  They slither by.

Anxiously, Rosie thumbs her Blackberry with one hand, texting Jakarta contacts about Lombok veterinarians, while comforting the dog with her other hand.

It starts to rain.

Hours later, Lorna is still drained and agitated.  As she walks to an early dinner, she hopes to catch the sunset, maybe from a table on the lower terrace, out of sight.

Approaching the café, she notices Celeste is already at “their” table, which is set for three.  Lorna considers retreating, ordering room service and eating peacefully on her deck.

Something impels her forward.

Celeste’s face looks as if it’s been shattered and reassembled with several pieces missing.

“I was praying you would come.”

Lorna slides next to Celeste.  “Rosie is still in Mataram, with the veterinarian.”

“She found a vet!”  Celeste exclaims happily.  “That resourceful sprite.”

Lorna can’t think how to respond.

Celeste raises the bottle toward Lorna’s glass.

“I don’t…” she begins, then recalls the woman sobbing next to Amin.  “Thanks, I could use some wine.”

Tentatively, Celeste asks, “Will the dog be alright?”

“It was doubtful when Rosie sent me home.  Nothing I could do.  Maybe nothing the vet can do.”

“What a shame.  I was looking forward to our farewell meal.”  Her voice is fluting again.

Lorna notes the bottle is almost empty.  She waits.

Eyes red, breath short, Celeste grasps Lorna’s hand.  “Oh, I am so ashamed.  It’s all my fault, urging Amin around the bus.  Then I abandoned you both.  And the poor dog.”

Lorna wonders unkindly if Celeste had a good reflexology session, then she softens, aware she’s never seen Celeste touch anyone before.

“Today’s horrible accident brought it all back.  Every detail so vividly.”

“Your husband?”

“Rol suddenly collapsed to the street.  People, dozens, clustered around.  I couldn’t get anyone to call an ambulance.  I stood there, waving like a berserk windmill at passing cars and rickshaws when Roland breathed his last.  Waving my arms when I should have been kneeling next to Rol, holding him.  When I should have…”

Lorna tears up.  “It was a crisis.  You did your best.”

“No, I should have held his hand,” Celeste sobs,“caressed his face.”

Neela appears.  “Something is wrong with Ibu?  Can I help?”

“No, terima kasih, Neela,” Celeste manages.  “I think I’ll have dinner upstairs.”

“Here, I’ll walk you back,” Lorna offers.

Celeste nods, her eyes closed.

“Perhaps Neela could you bring my prawns and my friend’s dish upstairs?  We’d like to have dinner in my room.”

“How very gracious.”  Celeste looks like a girl rescued from the bottom of a well.

Lorna glances back dolefully as sun hits the horizon of endless water.  Her last night in Paradise.

About 10pm, Lorna is released from her novel by a knock on the door.

A ragged Rosie, hair askew, dress dusty, collapses in a chair.  Half her spikes have drooped in the rain.  Grateful, she accepts a Bintang and the roasted vegetarian sandwich Lorna had wrapped for her.

Lorna waits as Rosie eats and drinks, then asks hesitantly.  “How is he?”

She yawns.  “The vet thinks Buster will pull through.  We’ll know by morning.”

“Buster?  You found the owner?  Tourists?”

“No, but I couldn’t keep calling him ‘Dog.’  I considered the Indonesian ‘anjing,’ but people use that as an insult.  ‘Kutta’ didn’t fit.  He responds to ‘Buster,’” she says sheepishly.

“Great name!”  Lorna giggles.  Rosie joins her, cracking the tension.

“Will the vet try to locate the owner?”

Rosie sighs, obviously exhausted.  “He says no one would claim a dog with these injuries.  He’ll take months to heal, if he survives.”

Lorna stares out the window at the rising moon.

“But that woman!” Rosie clenches her teeth.  “That wretched woman and her fucking foot reflexology.  I’ve never met anyone so heartless.”

“Maybe,” Lorna begins tentatively, “maybe not heartless.”  Why does she need Rosie and Celeste to understand one another?

“Gutless, then.”

“Let me tell you about our dinner conversation.”

“You ate with that woman after all…”

“Wait, Rosie.  Listen.”

*

Friday

Lorna sits alone at the café.  It’s been a sleepless night and she’s up too early.

Neela welcomes her with coffee and big smile.

Lorna wonders if omnipresent Neela sleeps in the kitchen.

Inhaling the warmth and aroma of the steaming cup, she watches a predawn sky alchemize to gold as the sun rises over the sea.  Yes, she’ll tell Tracy truthfully; she has learned to relax.  A little each day.  To savor the salty bounty of the southern waters 900 years after “her” first boat journeys.  To enjoy today’s sun.  And in accepting the contradictions within Rosie and Celeste, she acknowledges some of her own.  She still loves her work, but now she also relishes the shimmying of palm fronds and the scents of flowery perfumes. Mission accomplished, Tracy.  Almost, anyway.

“Hi friend!”

Lorna turns to a grinning Rosie.

“Buster made it?!”

“Yup.  Looks like I have a new dog.”  She rubs sleep from her eyes.

“You’re taking him to Jakarta?”

“Vet said it was a peachy idea.  Since it’s impossible to find him a home here. Because of Muslim prohibitions.  I should have been more sensitive to Amin.  Attitudes change from island to island.  The Balinese like barking dogs for protection.  I told you my Jakarta neighbors loved Kutta.  A lot of city professionals have pets.  Anyway, the vet was super relieved that I could adopt Buster.”  Yesterday’s anxious face is now alive with relief and excitement.

“You’ll have one more friend in Jakarta.”

“Can’t have too many.”  She laughs.  “Hey, where’s the massage queen?”
Lorna frowns.  “I haven’t seen Celeste this morning.”

Neela pours Rosie’s coffee.  “You ask about Ibu.  She sailed for Bali to catch an earlier flight to Thailand.  She left you ladies a letter.”

Rosie accepts the ivory vellum envelope then hands it to Lorna.

Lorna removes the letter, placing it on the table between them.

Dear Friends,

Apologies for my stupid, panicky behavior yesterday.  I was too full of my own heartache to respond with any dignity.  I admire the nobility you both showed.

Attached is a money order which I hope Rosie will give the veterinarian to pay for treating what I imagine will be her dog.

Rosie stares at Lorna, who grins.

There is enough left over to help him develop the clinic.  I’m certain more animals will be rescued by other decent folk.

I hope against hope that we meet again.  All of us.  My address and email are below.  Farewell and thank you for four idyllic days.”

With great affection,

Celeste

Rosie is shaking her head and Lorna once again marvels that the gelled spikes don’t move.  “The white lady buying absolution.  So-damn-typical.”

Lorna studies her young friend’s resolute eyes.  “Maybe,” she begins, then pauses for the right words.  “Maybe it’s only a matter of degree how different we are from Celeste.”

Rosie shrugs, stares at the ocean.

“Even if my very ancient ancestors were Indonesian, I now travel with a London education and salary.”

Rosie glowers.

“Which buy me access, comforts, with largely insulate me.”

“OK, Professor,” Rosie sighs.  “OK, maybe she did her best.”

“Maybe we each did.”

“And Buster survived.”

Rosie can’t help herself—“Idyllic?”

Lorna shrugs.  “You’re the linguist.  I’m just an historian.”

Neela places two elaborate breakfasts on the table: breads, fruit, eggs and potatoes.

“Sorry, I didn’t order…” Rosie begins

“Compliments of Ibu Celeste,” Neela smiles sadly.

“Terima Kasih,” they say in unison.

Paradise, Lorna will tell Tracy, is more complicated than you might imagine.

Nora braces against a damp chill and a dusting of snow as she heads out of her Neukölln low rise to interview Georg Weiss. Weiss is the fourth entry on her contact list, which she has carefully typed and hung by a piece of tape to the window in front of her Toshiba laptop.  There are handwritten notes in parentheses about each name and where she got it. Earlier, Nora double checked the page while she sat at her desk by the window. The list is varied; a folk musician, a philosophy professor, a dental student, and today’s subject: a German academic on the far right. He doesn’t write Holocaust denial literature, but seems to enjoy reading it and sending it on to friends with pithy comments and exclamation marks in the margins, judging from the newsletters he had forwarded to Nora’s former teacher Mona Heinz, who passed her Weiss’s name.

In these first days in Berlin, 1990, Nora finds it prudent to wait at least two weeks between an introductory letter to a newspaper and a follow-up phone call. Her attempts to contact American foreign correspondents in the city have yielded little work. Some of the veteran scribes are out of town, having been sent to the Middle East to cover the troop build-up in Kuwait. So she leaves her apartment house each morning to read the International Herald Tribune at Café Untergrund, then circles back home an hour later as if arriving at the office to start her work day. The list on the window gives her structure. The days are open-ended, the potential articles as yet unformed. Every individual on the list represents no greater and no less a potential for insight. She is a student of culture. The café is less smoky at 9 am than it is at 10 am. Today’s lesson: Georg Weiss.

Nora writes down bus and subway directions to all her meetings, matching the transit map to the city map and linking the regions mentally as she emerges like a mole from the various U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations. To find Weiss, across town in a suburb at the far west end of the city, Nora takes the line marked Rathaus Spandau. Spandau is the prison where Rudolph Hess sat for two decades alone, an entire staff ministering to him until he died in 1987, when they could finally tear down the building. Berliners like to eliminate historic sites that pose a risk of becoming shrines to Nazism. Passing by Spandau on the U-Bahn seems fitting to Nora as she heads to meet what she presumes is as close to a modern-day Nazi as she will find this week.

Inside his front door Weiss is effusive about their mutual friend Mona Heinz, whom he met at a leadership conference in Vienna, and he is pleasantly inquisitive about his guest, even flattered that she has come out for a visit on a Sunday. She unconsciously assumes neutral Canadian girl persona, the one that obscures any inkling of Jewishness or even undue curiosity about his leanings.  He takes her coat and offers coffee and cake. They meet alone in his study as his wife, or possibly his housekeeper, putters around in the background. Weiss leaves the room to fetch refreshments. His office has a dried out, worn look.  She scans the books, multi-syllabic German titles of political science and psychology. ‘No swastikas on the spines,’ she mentally notes, mocking her own nervousness. There are family photos in chunky frames on the desk. Ornate furnishings in dark wood. Not too kitchy but not classy either. Carpeting is late 1970s. Spiessig, German middle brow.

Clinical calm is her current pose, to handle the slight buzz she feels.  She loves the throat thump of meetings like this in the lion’s den. Jewish woman, young journalist, confronts German Nazi. It’s why she is in this city altogether she suddenly realizes. It’s a kick, like sleeping with a Palestinian would surely be. She thinks of her brother Michael, who once called her an ‘intellectual adventurer.’ They were hiking in the Alberta Rockies and she was less than enthusiastic about plunging into a rushing river, with pack and boots held aloft. A day earlier she had frozen in fear on a steep scree slope. “You travel the world. You’re very brave. And yet you chicken out on these physical escapades. I don’t quite get it,” Michael mused.  “Wait. I do get it. You are an intellectual adventurer. It’s not physical or kinesthetic risk that turns you on, it’s emotional danger. It’s a mind rush with you. Yes. That’s it.”

That mind rush is in gear now as Georg Weiss looks into her very brown eyes and says “So. What is it about our Republikaner branch that you would like to know?”

“Actually, I’ve read a fair amount about the party platform and how it has been growing in popularity since the Wall fell,” she answers. “I’m interested in a more personal view. What makes you, a history professor, so enthusiastic about the party that you decided to get so involved? Tell me why it means so much to you, Herr Doktor Professor Weiss.”

“Well, you know,” Weiss begins slowly.  “Now that Germany is reunited, it is time to raise our heads up and be a normal country once again. That is really what the Republikaners are all about. Being normal Germans once again after decades of abnormalcy. ” The accent is thick and confident. Chermans and Chermany .

“What does being a normal country mean to you? Does it mean a country free of non-Germans? The party clearly favors expelling foreigners.”

“Look, my dear. You are from Canada. Canada and the United States are immigration countries. Germany is not an immigration country and never has been. Nor is there any room here to accommodate economic refugees from eastern Europe or southern Europe or northern Africa. Especially at this time when our national resources are completely taxed by the project of unifying east and west, it would be a recipe for social instability to attempt integration of various external cultures at the same time.”

He is silver haired, urbane, with smooth hairless hands and watery large eyes. He speaks in thesis-like sentences. She is repelled by what he is saying and yet the effect on her is mildly erotic. While voicing academic jargon, he looks directly into her eyes as if they are co-conspirators. She has become, in a way, a double agent.

Weiss continues with a vocabulary that betrays no hidden bigotry. He peppers sociological arguments like banter at a dinner party, including her in his “us and them” view of the world, a string of seemingly sensible notions of citizenship and economic development.

“You know, people accuse us Republikaners of being racist. We are not racist. We are patriots who don’t believe Germany must spend the next five decades apologizing for what has happened five decades ago.         

“The charges are ridiculous really. You know, some of my best friends are black — and Jewish too. I have a dear friend, a Nigerian professor. He and I see completely eye to eye on world trends. And my friend Stanley Katzman in New York would never call me racist. Stan and I agree that Israel is the Jewish homeland. And Stan and I agree that Jewish people would feel much more comfortable there, living in their home, than here, in Germany.”

His eyes are twinkling now as if she were party to an in-joke. “I believe in full rights for Turks – in Turkey,” he laughs. “I don’t think the multi-cultural model can work for us at a time when our country’s first priority must be to fuse a national identity from two parts that have been tragically separated since the end of World War II. For Germany to assume its new role as the leader of Europe, it must be very clear on its own cultural identity…”

She looks at Weiss and tries to imagine his demographic equivalent at home, a history professor at the University of Toronto whom she might interview about Canadian identity and immigration. In Toronto he would be a fringe character, his stance out of step with his education and breeding and stature. Weiss, by contrast, is the result of life in a mono-culture. He feels no shame because he has no concept of how it can be otherwise. Already at dinner parties, Nora had heard comments about Jews and foreigners that those in similar circles at home would never utter, even if they flirted with those ideas. A different threshold. We are products of place, not time, she thinks. His words are tinkling down like little brass chips on a glass surface.

As Weiss launches into the importance of local level participation, she suddenly feels cold. She thinks of Oriana Fallaci pulling off her veil in front of the old Ayatollah Khomeini and realizes that the bold excitement she experienced meeting Weiss an hour ago has dissipated.  The flush from her cheeks has cooled and she is suddenly very, very tired. She has no desire to confront, or reveal, or symbolically pull down her pants and show the Nazi her circumcision. She feels just drained, and lonely, and detached. She nonetheless ends their session with vigorous handshakes and knowing smiles. And warm regards to Mona Heinz.

The sun is already setting as Nora makes her way to the suburban bus stop that will take her back into the city with its Turks and punks and aura of urban acceptance. It is Sunday and as she looks on the bus chart schedule mounted on a sidewalk post, she realizes she is facing nearly 20 minutes in the cold before the next departure. Fortunately, the bus with her number pulls up in five minutes and unloads its passengers. Before she can step up, the driver closes the door in front of her and busies himself with notations in his log book. Snowflakes are now falling and the wind is picking up. Nora raps on the door window to get the driver’s attention. He opens the door and informs her in German that she may not get onto the bus.

“But why not?” she asks, feeling warm air from the heating system meet her cheeks.

“We have 15 minutes before departure,” he answers. “Nobody gets on until three minutes before scheduled departure.”

“But I’m the only one here. It’s cold. Surely, I can wait on the bus, rather than outside,” she insists.

“Sorry, Ma’am.” The door closes in her face.  She stands directly in front of the bus door for the next 15 minutes so the driver can reconsider at any time. He never relents. It doesn’t occur to him as an option. She cannot feel her toes by the time two local women with purple grey hair and woolen hats approach to board the bus. The women arrive one minute before the bus doors open on schedule for the ride out of Spandau.   

Excerpt from a novel in progress about a young journalist in Berlin after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The last Friday of August, summer coming to an end, fresh corn and ripe tomatoes still abundant at the market, new radishes in bunches near string beans and purple bell peppers and, taking over as market stars, the farmer’s favorite, rosy, sweet crab apples, here today, gone tomorrow.  I buy two pounds and plan to bring most as a guest gift at Sunday’s lunch. But with that, I’ve done it again, bought more than I can carry home. I’ll have to take a taxi. The university’s systems block ride-hailing in its immediate area and in its protecting zone Haitian drivers still wait for business near the bank where I set down my bag of produce and get cash at the ATM.  I’ve overspent at the market before and some taxi drivers recognize me, know that I’m here with market produce and know where to take me home. I know some of their names but today the man who gestures me to the cab I am to take shepherds me to a driver new to me and I to him.

My elderly driver doesn’t recognize where I want to go. Confident in error, he takes me for a woman he sometimes drives to Boston and rounds the corner to drive to her address. I suppose all white old ladies look alike to him. In a clear voice I repeat my address in Cambridge, and he suggests another incorrect address. I say my address again and that we need Mass Ave and should turn left.  I wonder about his hearing and whether my British accent confuses him.   We turn back to Mass Ave, he has no GPS and I give him a landmark and street name. In a minute or two, he tells me he is re-setting the meter. I will not have to pay for his error.

He follows the route I suggest and soon recognizes where we are and names the turn I ask for. But he does not know this next stretch, “Please turn right at the Stop sign.”  He slows down, peers at the street ahead and sounding relieved, says, ”I see it,” and turns right.  After this block, there’s an intersection and quick turn.  He recognizes this part and foretells the street we want but when we make the turn, he  loses confidence and slows down again. Another confusing fragment of memory?  “A bit further.” We drive on, he recovers and foretells  the following intersection. Then we come to my street. He slows, “Right or left?” “Left, please.” He makes the turn, “Thank you.  That’s my door.”

I hand him a $20 bill and he waits. “Please give me $10 change.” My usual fare.  If the driver has been efficient, the tip is generous., if not, not.  Today traffic is light and his re-setting the meter has brought the cost down further.  He gives me a $10 bill and I climb out. He is at the door, waits for me to reach the curb, and hands me my bag of produce. “Thank you.” “Thank you.” Two old people patient with each other. It has not been an easy ride, but we’ve made it.

 “I used to live near here,” he confides, and gives me the name of his street. It’s a long street. Near here, veterans bought small houses after World War II.  I hear that one house will soon be demolished and condos will tower over those that remain.   A block of condos already fills in the parking lot across from the century-old hardware store  that used to serve the neighborhood.  Its basement of tools and spare parts are still a local legend. My downstairs neighbor kept a set of keys there for workmen who needed access and at the closing when she sold her condo and the lawyers said nothing could proceed without a new fire alarm, the owner and an assistant entered, installed the alarm, and called the lawyers to say the closing could continue. Next weekend there’ll be a 10k race named for the cashier and maven  who worked there until cancer stopped her three years ago. That street continues to the other side of the tracks and when I moved here twenty-three years ago, that side was still home to Haitian and Irish immigrants, French Canadians and African Americans from the South. Also to the orphanage, the slaughterhouse and the Catholic cemetery.  On both sides of the tracks, some triple-deckers still shelter multiple generations of one family. I do not ask my driver which side of the tracks he lived in or where he lives now.

I remember the fares he confuses and half-recalls.  We have both lived long histories and know the city’s transformations. I believe that like me, he was born in another country. We part like neighbors who have known each other many years and may yet meet again.

 

The officers were out of their jurisdiction.

The Shunamite woman prepared a room for Elisha and his servant Gehazi. And Elisha and his servant Gehazi did not pay rent to the Shunamite woman. For Elisha and his servant Gehazi to pay rent to the Shunamite woman would have been an abomination in the sense that for them to pay rent to the Shunamite woman would have been to undermine her graciousness and thereby cancel her blessing.

I said this to Mrs. O’Bryan through the door. I had opened it a crack to allow for just enough room for my one eye to see and to be seen and for my words to be spoken and to be heard. “Chicago is Shunem. You are the Shunamite woman. Annie is Gehazi. I am Elisha. To forgive the rent would be your graciousness. For me to pay the rent would be an abomination.”

Mrs. O’Bryan walked away from the door rather than make an answer, which I interpreted to mean she had acquiesced or was considering acquiescing. But I misinterpreted. Rather than acquiesce or consider acquiescing, she summoned two wiry police officers to remove me bodily.

“You shall not be blessed with a child in your old age,” I said to Mrs. O’Bryan as I was being removed bodily down the hall toward the stairs by the two wiry officers. When the two wiry officers had knocked, I had opened the door a crack to allow just enough room for my one eye to see and to be seen and for my words to be spoken and to be heard, but the two wiry officers’ fingers pried the crack wider to make just enough room for their arms to reach in and then wider for me to be removed bodily.

“Unlike the Shunamite woman, your womb will remain barren,” I said.

“You the one who bashed him in the side of the head?” the wirier of the two wiry officers, who led me by my sleeve and the back of my collar, respectively, asked Mrs. O’Bryan. “There’s a mess of dried blood in his hair.”

“I’ve had seven children already, you imbecile,” she said, and the two wiry officers snorted like pigs snort. “Please, Mr. Guiteau,” she said, “bless me, please, with the curse of barrenness, you hornswoggler. Please, where were you ten years ago, you nincompoop?”

“Ten years ago I was preparing my flock, who did not understand they were my flock and did not understand they were being prepared,” I said.

“You’re a loon,” Mrs. O’Bryan said. “You’re a muttonhead.”

“Should one of your children expire, I shall not stretch my body over him and breathe into him new life,” I said.

The two wiry officers, who led me by my sleeve and the back of my collar, respectively, took the stairs in such a way that simultaneously pulled me and pushed me. “Do not threaten the lady’s children,” the wirier of the two wiry officers said. “It’s one thing to be a deadbeat drunk. It’s wholly another thing to bring harm to a child.”

“I’d rather my child stay dead than have the likes of you touch him, you derelict,” Mrs. O’Bryan said. She leaned over the bannister to say this so that I was able to catch a glimpse of Annie behind her.

“So it shall be, Mrs. O’Bryan,” I said. “Everyone in your family who dies from this point forward will stay dead. You had your opportunity to turn your heart to the right through acting graciously, and you have mismanaged it.”

“I hear men in jail often get their throats slit when they sleep,” Mrs. O’Bryan said. “Have you heard that, Mr. Guiteau?”

I missed the last step so that my foot landed heavily on the foot of the less wiry of the two wiry officers, who led me by my sleeve and the back of my collar, respectively, and in response the less wiry of the two wiry officers sunk an elbow into my ribcage. “Here’s one for your trouble, you oaf,” he said. “Watch your step now unless you’re looking for one in the nose.”

“How do you suppose throwing me in jail will get you your rent, Mrs. O’Bryan?” I called up the stairs after regathering my wind. “Additionally, don’t you think these good officers have better things to do than busy themselves with a simple misunderstanding involving a few dollars?”

“Not at all,” answered the less wiry of the two wiry officers.

“The job is the job,” added the wirier of the two wiry officers.

“I figure I’ll never get another nickel from you, you ne’er-do-well,” Mrs. O’Bryan said. “At least this way I get some satisfaction.” She turned her head then and noticed Annie. When Mrs. O’Bryan addressed me again, I noted how Annie’s presence had softened her voice like how darkness or snow or an empty room or a passing train or a ship ribboning out from shore or a flock of geese descending on a pond will soften a voice. “I don’t suppose anyone will be the worse off if you disappear for a while, Mr. Guiteau. Your wife included. If I were her, God help me, I’d fill my apron with rocks and walk into Lake Michigan. Alternatively, I would take this window of opportunity to make a run for it, return to my people if I had any, initiate divorce proceedings, and reflect on the missteps, mis-decisions, and misjudgments that have led me to such a sorry circumstance as to have you as a husband.”

“Annie is the woman you are not,” I answered Mrs. O’Bryan. “She knows her place is with me as I know mine is with her. What God has rightfully joined, let no iniquitous demoness put asunder.”

“You some kind of a preacher?” asked the wirier of the two wiry officers, who led me by my sleeve and the back of my collar, respectively.

“I think I know what kind,” answered the less wiry of the two wiry officers, and the two wiry officers snorted like pigs snort.

“If it wouldn’t be too much to ask, I’d greatly appreciate a couple hours to gather my things and get my bearings,” Annie said to Mrs. O’Bryan. At the top of the banister where it started, her voice was a whisper, but in its descent it gained volume so that when it reached me at the bottom of the stairs where I lingered in the hands of the two wiry officers, who led me by my sleeve and the back of my collar, respectively, it rang in my ears like a gunshot. “I’ll be gone before supper,” Annie said.

“Take until morning if necessary, dear. I can’t imagine what such a man as this must’ve put you through.” Mrs. O’Bryan patted Annie’s hand. “Well, I can imagine a little. I’m no busybody, but these walls are thin.”

As the two wiry officers, who led me by my sleeve and the back of my collar, respectively, continued to remove me bodily, I kept my head turned over my shoulder for as long as I could, determined not to miss the opportunity should it present itself to meet Annie’s eyes, but the opportunity did not present itself insofar as Annie decided to turn and disappear down the dark hall toward our room rather than present me the opportunity to meet her eyes.

In the wagon on the way to the jail, I questioned the quality of the two wiry officers’ horse, and in response the two wiry officers sunk their respective elbows into my ribcage.

“I am thirsty,” I said after regathering my wind.

“You don’t smell thirsty,” the wirier of the two wiry officers said. “You smell like you’ve had quite enough to drink. You smell like you shouldn’t be thirsty again for a good while.”

“You can have some water when we get you to the jail,” the less wiry of the two wiry officers said. “Then you can settle in and sober up.”

“There were two thieves,” I said. “One mocked Him and one treated Him with kindness and reverence. Care to guess which of the two He remembered in glory?”

“What is he babbling about?” the wirier officer asked the less wiry officer.

“Christ on the cross,” the less wiry of the two wiry officers answered. “Sorry to tell you that you’re off to hell, while I’m bound for heaven.”

“Hell, huh?” the wirier of the two wiry officers answered, and then he sunk his elbow into my ribcage. “If it’s already decided, I guess I might as well get my licks in.”

“You make a good point,” the less wiry of the two wiry officers said, and then he sunk his elbow into my ribcage. “If the die has already been cast.”

In the cell where I was deposited there resided three other men, one large man, one middle-sized man, and one man who appeared not much more than a boy. The large man strode over to me and sat down on the bench beside me. “Why are you wincing and writhing, sir?” he said.

“My ribcage,” I said. “My escorts took turns assaulting me with their elbows.”

“They’ll do that,” the large man said, nodding in commiseration. “Like this, right?” he said, and then he sunk his elbow into my ribcage. Whereas the elbows delivered by the two wiry officers took my wind and produced a warm pain that gradually relented, the large man’s elbow produced a cold, sharp pain that gradually increased in intensity.

“You hear that crack?” the large man snickered and called across the cell to the middle-sized man and the man who appeared not much more than a boy. “This bloke’s rib broke.”

“What’d you go and do that for?” the middle-sized man said. When he stood, the cap he had tucked in his waistband fell out so that he had to re-tuck the cap in his waistband. “Geezum, Neil.”

“Geezum, Neil.” The man who appeared not much more than a boy parroted the middle-sized man.

“I didn’t aim to break it,” the large man said. “I was just being rambunctious. I didn’t even hit him hard. I sure could have hit him harder. Someone bashed him in the head. His hair’s a mess of dried blood on this side. That wasn’t me.”

“Geezum, Neil,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said again.

“Clam up, Jerry,” the large man said, and then he addressed the middle-sized man. “I didn’t do it purposefully, Dan,” he said. “What would I ever want to break this bloke’s rib purposefully for?”

“Geezum, Neil,” the middle-sized man said again.

“Oh, geezum,” the large man said. “I was just being rambunctious. I apologize, friend,” the large man said to me. “I was just being rambunctious. I didn’t even hit you hard. I sure could’ve hit you harder.”

The middle-sized man walked over to the bench, tapped the large man, waved him up, and sat down. “A busted rib is a painful encumbrance,” the middle-sized man said to me. “And dangerous. Our ribs are there for a reason. They’re meant to protect all the soft, essential parts we carry in our middles.”

“Our kidneys and pancreases and livers,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said.

“What do you know, Jerry?” the large man said. “You don’t know.”

“It hurts to breathe,” I said.

“You have to breathe, though,” the middle-sized man said. He leaned into the space between us. “Concentrate on taking short, shallow breaths as opposed to long, deep breaths. And whatever you do, don’t cough or sneeze.”

“I feel like I have to do both,” I said.

“That’s your mind telling you that,” the middle-sized man said. “I just told you not to, so your mind is telling you that you have to. That’s how minds work. Tell your mind to mind its own business.”

“Sneezing is involuntary,” I said. “I think coughing might be, too.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that score,” the middle-sized man said.

“I didn’t even get him hard,” the large man said. “I sure could have hit him harder.” His back was to us as he leaned into the far corner of the cell where he made use of the chamber pot as he rested his forehead against the clammy wall. “Probably the cops beating on him brittled up his rib so all it took to bust it was a tap. I didn’t even hit him hard.”

“My body was made to be broken,” I said.

“How’s that?” the middle-sized man asked.

“I have been overcome by bees and have tumbled from the mow of a burning barn and had my leg snapped in a bear trap and have been brained by a ham and dented by a baseball and unjustly defenestrated in the middle of the night by thugs.”

“Hell,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said, “our father shot off his own finger once, and when we were kids, Neil hit me in the back of the head with a shovel and I didn’t wake up for almost a whole day.”

“You three are brothers,” I said.

“It probably wasn’t so much how hard I hit him because I didn’t hit him hard at all as much as it was I hit him in just the right spot,” the large man said.

“Your brother with the shovel or me with your elbow?” I said.

“Yes, we are brothers,” the middle-sized man said. “To this point we have been, anyhow. Although lately I’ve been considering ending the relationship.”

“That’s a joke he makes,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said. “Making like one can get rid of a brother like a sweetheart or a wife.”

“What God has rightfully joined, let no man put asunder,” I said.

“You have one?” the middle-sized man asked.

“A brother or wife?” I asked.

“Either. How about wife.”

“Annie,” I said. “I do.”

“None of us has a wife,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said. “None of us even has a sweetheart.”

“We’ve dodged that bullet,” the large man said, turning away from the wall to face us. “Dan came closest, but he wised up just in the nick of time.”

When I stood, the pain in my ribcage flared so that I could speak only in a whisper. “I need to use the chamber pot if you wouldn’t mind making way, please,” I said.

“Sure thing,” the large man said. He took two steps to the side and watched me undo my drawers and relieve myself.

“Give him some breathing room,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said. “Geezum, Neil.”

“He’s pissing blood,” the large man said as he watched me. “I didn’t even hit him that hard. I sure could have hit him harder.”

“Our ribs are there for a reason,” the middle-sized man said.

I tried to stop myself from pissing blood, but stopping burned more than pissing, which also burned but not as much as stopping. When I returned to the bench and sat, I coughed, and the cough turned into a sneeze, which turned into another sneeze, which turned into another cough, which made me have to return to the chamber pot not to piss blood again but to spit blood, after which I returned to the bench where I again coughed and sneezed.

“You have come full circle,” the middle-sized man said and clapped me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re feeling so poorly, but your suffering might prove fruitful. Sometimes the powers-that-be will turn you loose if you’re sickly. They’d rather a body die on his own recognizance rather than on their recognizance.”

“They won’t believe whining and crying, but if you can show them you’re pissing and spitting blood, that might work,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said. “Depending on the nature of your infraction, of course.”

“Temporary financial difficulties and an unreasonable landlady,” I said. “My wife will be by shortly. She’ll bail me out and tend to me.”

“With what will she bail you out?” the middle-sized man said. “Given your temporary financial difficulties, I mean.”

“Maybe she won’t need money,” the large man said. “Is your wife comely? If she’s comely, maybe she won’t need money. Maybe she and the jailer will work something out.”

The man who appeared not much more than a boy smirked. “Maybe she’d be able to work something out for all four of us.”

“Forgive my brothers,” the middle-sized man said.

“I will not forgive them,” I said. “For they know what they do.”

“I wonder what’s keeping your wife,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said. “Perhaps she has other priorities today.”

“I will not forgive them,” I said. “For they are not destined to be forgiven.”

“How’s that?” the middle-sized man said. “How is it you won’t forgive my brothers when I’m asking you kindly to do so?”

“She sure is taking her time,” the man who appeared not much more than a boy said.

“She worth waiting for?” the large man asked, and he grinned. “Maybe I’ll wait for her once or twice.”

“How’s that?” the middle-sized man said. “How is it you won’t forgive?”

“They took turns mocking Him and struck Him again and again,” I said.

The middle-sized man slid closer to me on the bench. “How’s that?” he said, and he sunk his elbow into my ribcage, and the cell was filled with blinding light and deafening thunder, and its walls cracked like ribs, and the mouths of the large man and the middle-sized man and the man who appeared not much more than a boy filled with blood, and the large man and the middle-sized man and the man who appeared not much more than a boy prostrated themselves, and the earth swallowed them up, and the cell door was thrown open by a rushing gale, and I was restored, and I was delivered.

 

 

 

Vladimir believes he may or may not be sitting in an elegant second-class compartment with two elegant strangers on a steam train pulling out of Alexanderplatz Station.

Perhaps he is dreaming. How, the question springs to mind, could one know? Perhaps he is really on his way to visit his mother and sister in Prague. He wants to say that is most likely the case. His mother has been doing poorly ever since his father’s death. So Vladimir is leaving Véra behind in their flat on Agamemnonstraße for ten days to become his mother’s son again. Walking toward her across the platform at Masaryk Station he will, as always, feel himself scrap one year’s age for each step he takes. He will arrive in her austere embrace an eight-year-old boy in a sailor suit.

Still, he also has the distinct impression he hasn’t yet reached his compartment, that he may be forever passing the odd chap with the shipwrecked look braked on those stairs. Not much older than Vladimir himself, good-looking in that block-jawed, dead-eyed Germanic way, he was engrossed in patting himself down as if under attack by a squadron of enraged invisible bees.

 

There Vladimir is, contentedly automatic, locating an empty wooden-slatted seat, sliding his beat-up brown leather suitcase into the luggage rack above it, settling in for the tedious trip. There he is acknowledging with a polite smile and infinitesimal nod the couple perched across from him: the proud elderly woman with gray-bunned hair and burnished cane; her proud elderly husband with tightly trimmed gray beard and tortoiseshell glasses. They stare back at him, expressionless, making him suffer his foreignness as long as they can.

Vladimir takes out his rumpled copy of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, ready to revisit some of his favorite passages, closes his scratchy eyes to cleanse his mental palate, and everything liquefies into golden haze, puffy quilts, feather pillows, and perhaps the second awakening into the day (if not yet the last), into a younger, lankier version of himself sitting drowsily, not in that elegant second-class compartment any more, but in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, listening carelessly to his father on stage deliver some political polemics in which Vladimir is sure he should have taken more interest … and next two baritones behind him are unexpectedly joining together in the Tsarist national anthem.

He turns to see what all the vocal flag-waving is about only to find himself surveying his Berlin housing block from across Agamemnonstraße. It is a handsome corner building, courtesy of Véra’s cousin Anna Feigin, whose subtenants they now are, and sticks out like a tremendous red modernist ship, carrying a complex and glassy turreted structure on its bow. On each of the little balconies girdling it something green blossoms. Only the Schmetterlings’ is untidily empty, with an orphaned pot on the parapet and a corpse hung out in moth-eaten furs to air. Véra’s and his two rooms (one for waking and cooking, one for sleeping and dressing) are situated on the third floor.

They have a nice view into the cobblestone courtyard with its bushy fringe punctuated by infant chestnut trees and, in the center, a faux Roman statue of Flora or Fortuna or Felicitas.

 

Vladimir has not been sleeping well. No doubt that is what this is all about. He is deep into the insomniac undertow of a new novel. It concerns one Franz Bubendorf, an ordinary boylike man living an ordinary boylike life who unwittingly strays into an affair with the older wife of his well-to-do uncle. Soon she (Vladimir thinks of her as a Charlotte, although he is nagged by the suspicion she may rather turn out to be more a motherly Martha or Maria, a dishy Dorothea or Dolores) begins plotting her husband’s homicide. Franz accompanies the couple on a vacation to a resort on the Baltic, where Charlotte nearly goes through with her plan — having Franz row her and her husband far from shore one cold drizzly morning, helping the former boot the lout out of the boat, and letting him (who cannot, it has been foreshadowed, swim) drown in a choppy sea of revelations while Franz and Charlotte (let’s call her Charlotte for now) merrily paddle toward their happily-ever-after.

That is as far as Vladimir has gotten.

Where things veer next is anybody’s guess.

The not-knowing wakes him up every morning between two and four.

The problem with writing, Vladimir has come to understand, is the part involving writing. Ideas, characters, places, the stuff one brings into being off the page: child’s play. Every sentence, however, spews a thousand contingencies ahead of it, and each of those a thousand more.

The proliferation of proliferations feels like what that odd chap in the shabby olive tweed jacket at the station must have felt like.

Vladimir has been working on the manuscript late into every night, rising each morning at four-thirty to get in a few more hours’ composition (shut in the bathroom — so as not to disturb Véra — cross-legged on the floor, his writing desk his valise balanced over the toilet) before setting off to earn room and board by teaching tennis to teenage numbskulls and rich philistines on the courts behind the Universum Cinema on Ku’damm. He courteously cocks his pupils’ dim-witted arms for them, swings their over-priced rackets for them, scoops up their furry balls for them, talks for them, thinks for them, and encourages them to suppose they are making rip-roaring progress while he endures their assorted banalities expressed in a laundry basket of washed-out clichés.

 

He bolts awake, struck by the thought this awakening might simply be another false one, the next floor in some high-rise daymare, or perhaps some bottomless narcotic ocean, as if he were floating up from dark blue stratum to dark blue stratum but never reaching the undeniable surface, never emerging into the real reality.

It seems to him as if his life has suddenly grown into a mixed metaphor.

The elderly couple across from him has been replaced by twin girls in their Sunday finest, ten or twelve, smacking pink gum, fingering each other’s braided bister hair, referring to each other as Miranda, and snickering over some inevitably predictable wisecrack concerning what must appear to them to be the gangly balding twenty-eight-year-old coffin-dodger sharing their compartment.

Out the train window the station’s clock face (it is already 10:01) slowly turns away from him. One by one the vault’s colossal iron ribs start marching past, bearing off the depot. The platform slides past as well, carrying with it a strew of used tickets, crushed cups, cigarette butts, flecks of mid-morning sunlight, gobs of spittle, and the bright aluminum flash of a single abandoned coin. A luggage cart glides by, wheels motionless, a lone red-faced passenger in an olive wool cap reading the newspaper on a crawling bench, a stall hung with seductive gray fashion magazines and piled high with pretzels and pastries, a group of puzzled people on the accelerating platform, standing still, yet striding forward, yet retreating, and all at once Vladimir is boarding a yellow open-decked bus whose first two steps are comprised of the sandy soil of Grunewald’s forest — the sole spot in umber and sooted Berlin that Véra and he wholeheartedly enjoy because of its butterflies and pine breezes and butterflies and River Havel and peace and butterflies.

The forest floor dissolves under him.

He seizes the handrail to steady himself and a glottal voice — the conductor’s — croups in his ear: Up! Up!

When the bus jerks into motion he grabs someone’s shoulder but is carried along by the force of an inexorable curve, during which the whole vehicle seems to slant toward him, zooming Vladimir up another set of steps to materialize, finally, on the swaying deck.

 

Shakily he lowers himself onto a seat halfway back and takes in his surroundings. He is floating high above Ku’damm, the entire surface of his skin prickling. What is left of his hair dishevels in the wind. Without warning the sun has somehow commenced setting, transforming the banal stucco ornaments along the roofs and above the entryways and balconies into translucent porticoes, friezes and frescoes, trellises covered with orange roses, winged statues that lift skyward unbearably blazing lyres.

Vladimir believes thoroughly in each floor of his dream, even though he doesn’t, and when he looks again it is the middle of the night. He finds himself both lying beside Véra in their flat and strolling up a street he can’t seem to recognize toward his housing block. The city is blurred by rain. His spectacles (which he didn’t know he wore) are foggy. All he wants to do (and somehow with the next step he is in Prague, his mother and sister having for some reason failed to meet him) is reach his hotel to wash his face, change his shirt, and go out roaming through the old town’s labyrinthine lanes that prove with every erratic turn Kafka was a realist.

Vladimir understands he is still fast asleep, has been the whole time.

Except he is awake.

He opens his eyes, which are already open, expecting Véra’s soft arm lazing across his chest, but no: he is atop that open-decked bus. It is mid-morning and he is in mid-Berlin on his way to Alexanderplatz Station to catch that train to visit his mother and sister in —

 

He rotates in his seat to seek a little solace in the substantiality of his fellow passengers’ faces and is flustered to pick out, far at the back, that elderly couple from his compartment on the train.

They are squinting at him in a way only Germans can squint at others, as if Vladimir were sunlight, and the sunlight too irritatingly bright for them.

The idea skims through his befuddlement that cultivation and gentility may well end at the outskirts of this metropolis … and next two baritones behind him are unexpectedly joining together in the Tsarist national anthem.

 

He rotates in his seat to see what all the vocal flag-waving is about only to confront a pair of brawny thugs blundering up the aisle in the concert hall on whose stage his father is presently speaking, was speaking five years ago, will always be speaking.

As they pass, Vladimir notices the one closest to him is in the process of releasing an oily blue pistol, a boxy Korovin, from the shoulder holster inside his suit coat.

Before Vladimir can react, the Korovin begins barking in the direction of a silver-haired, silver-mustached, silver-bespectacled man sitting in the front row, the publisher and politician Pavel Milyukov.

Women cry out.

Men derange.

Chairs discompose.

In something close to a single gesture, Vladimir’s father steps from behind his podium, crosses the stage, leaps off, catches one of the assassins’ necks in the crook of his arm, and carries him to the floor with a hollow grunt-thump.

A brief, hectic wrestling match ruptures into spacetime.

Vladimir’s father is quickly on the bottom, quickly on top, straddling the assassin’s chest, quickly fisting him in the temple — yet, before anyone else can react, the second assassin, the one with the boxy Korovin, aims at Vladimir’s father’s back and fires.

Three times.

Vladimir’s father flinches and was a liberal lawyer, a statesman, a journalist.

The assassin re-aims at Milyukov. Steadies his arm. Pulls his trigger.

And nothing happens.

Stumped, he glares at Milyukov, down at his empty gun, then is beneath a heap of fairly well-fed, well-dressed men pinning him to the floor, while Vladimir — heedless that one day, because of these sixty seconds, Véra will insist she carry her own small pistol in her purse to protect him from his reputation — watches the arched hulk of Alexanderplatz Station recede from present to preterite and thinks about how his dad died defending one of his own political rivals.

 

He turns back to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and unveils himself strolling arm-in-arm with his father among brightly lit stalls of the Christmas market on Gendarmenmarkt. The two are spending an uneventful evening together while Vladimir is in Berlin on winter-break from Cambridge.

Their universe is tangy bratwurst, mittens, spicy glühwein, scarves, hand-carved boxes and mangers, marzipan-stuffed bread, and snow light as salt sifting down around them.

The moment is cold, gusty, simple, superb.

Nothing occurs and that, perhaps, is best of all, for this scene merely records a son and his source wandering among droves of holiday makers who speak a language from which Vladimir can retrieve only a handful of nouns and infinitives.

The duo doesn’t talk.

They merely allow the culture to lap over them until Vladimir’s father halts, tugs his son’s coat to get him to pay attention, and exclaims in his ear: Why can’t Russia do this?

Do what, papa?

Invent moments like this in places like this. Look. All these people want is to be happy. Good lord. The country’s not even sixty years old. What does Germany know that we in the land of czar-fetishists don’t?

Vladimir considers.

Everything, he answers.

Isn’t that remarkable, his father says, genuinely remarkable, as they stray on through the laughter and chatter and cheer.