Читать книгу Promiscuous Unbound - Bex Brian - Страница 8

Would you marry a man you didn’t know?” Sonia asked, breaking the silence that had fallen between us.

“I did,” I said, lifting myself up by my arms so I could make room on my bed for her to sit. I don’t like to do this. The heavy throb of blood swamping the bed-deadened points on my body create hot zones. “Anyway, she didn’t stay married long.”

“No, she ran away,” Sonia said, thoughtfully.

“Just like you, though I suspect she didn’t have to shimmy down the ivy the way you did when you ran away from school.”

Refugee. Escape and flight. Two seemingly related actions, or impulses, and yet flight is mindless whereas you need wile to escape. Here now, sedated just down the hall, is a girl from the outskirts of Pristina, a girl who probably never thought of either, and suddenly found herself caught up in both. The knock on the door. Her father, with his weak heart, can’t bring himself to open it. The noise is terrible. The family photos lining the hallway bounce with each blow; many fall to the floor and crash. Her father, mother, and brothers and sisters can see the front door beginning to splinter. Enough. Our refugee springs forward and opens the door to face men she once thought of as neighbors. All she can remember is the rush, the contrary human flow of men blowing past them into their tiny flat as she pushes her family out the door against the storm.

There’ll be no flight from the train. She realizes that soon enough. And she tells her little brother, who likes to collect tickets, not to be a jerk and start crying because they weren’t issuing any tickets for this ride. Pressed in with thousands of her countrymen, she is wedged in the middle of the aisle, surrounded by the exposed armpits of men reaching up to brace themselves against the rocking. It is a short ride, just over the border. But to reach true safety they have to walk. Days and days of walking, sleeping on the ground, no shelter, hardly any food and yet, and yet she feels strong. To her father’s endless tears she turns a cold eye. And once when he trips and falls and lies sobbing on the ground, she demands that he get up and pull himself together. Her mother and younger siblings, noting this new fiery beauty, soon become afraid of her and wonder what sort of sick devil would blossom in such circumstances.

She doesn’t care what they think. When they finally arrive at the camp, her family seems as far away as if she were looking at them from the wrong end of a telescope. She has already forgotten the smell of their little apartment, the cloistered hot kitchen, where the family gathered in the heavy air of boiled onions and cigarette smoke. She lasts no more than five minutes in their refugee tent. The younger children haven’t even had a chance to bathe, to tend to the terrible blisters festering on their feet, when she abandons them for the first time and goes to look for ways of escape.

And she finds one. A French soldier assigned to hand out toiletries to the camp’s bedraggled newcomers. His gift? Toothbrushes. She takes six, then goes back to her tent to wash her hair. When she realizes she doesn’t have a hairbrush, she uses all six toothbrushes to work out the knots. Then she goes back for more.

“Not just escape.” Sonia bowed her head. “Love. That’s what she thought, at least.”

I raised my brows.

“Then it was the uniform.”

“What’s so good about the French uniform?”

“Nothing, it’s like any other,” Sonia said waving her hand impatiently. “Or,” she said, “maybe it was because he was clean. That’s what the night nurse thinks.”

“She had just walked for four days and four nights,” I said. “No bath, no shower, no toilets.”

“Being that dirty, it could be why she got married. He was clean. I had a boyfriend once who never changed his underwear. I wouldn’t have married him. That I understand. But the time it took to love him . . .”

“There is no time limit,” I said. “I’ve loved a man the length of an elevator ride. She must have been one of thousands streaming past, one indistinguishable from the next, all worn out and filthy, and yet she was noticed. That’s something.”

I did begin to wonder, though, if other French soldiers had snapped up wives for themselves. Or was the refugee the only one? The one who made it happen. A newly minted victim, but hardly ignorant of the horrible alternatives she faced. Seeing the filth and the misery all around her, perhaps she just had to do something wildly romantic in the face of what might end up being an inevitable, anonymous death. She couldn’t help but have in her head images of other lovers, lovers who had died tragically, romantically in that roiling conflict. Like that Muslim boy, and Catholic girl, trying to escape Sarajevo, shot by snipers, reaching out to each other, their bodies lying there for days on end because it was just too dangerous to retrieve them. Why then wouldn’t she, in a crowd of a million, want more than anything to be one in a million?

“Still, to marry a man you don’t know . . .”

“Why the fuck not,” I told her. “It happens all the time. War changes things. Look at Churchill’s son. He had to have a wife before joining up, just had to. Married Pamela Harriman after one date. She was the last on his list. Six or seven other women first who couldn’t be convinced, despite the fact that he was Churchill’s boy.

“Who is Churchill?”

“Was. Dead now, they all are. He was the prime minister of England during World War Two. A fat guy with a cigar.”

“Oh him.”

“That Harriman, she knew what she was doing. Not only would she go on to marry a succession of rich and powerful men but she became the U.S. ambassador to France as well. Until, of course, she died of a heart attack last year taking her daily exercise in the Ritz swimming pool. Marriage works for some people.”

“But not for you?” Sonia asked, giving me one of her sideways glances. Up to that point she had been careful not to delve too deeply into the story of my marriage. I think she, like some of the nurses, believes I threw myself under that truck.

“Let’s not talk about this,” I said sharply, not ready for the wrong of it, let alone the right.

Would I marry a man I didn’t know? That’s not the question, not the dilemma. The molten core of one’s being, that’s the issue; how much does it need to be cooled for love?