Читать книгу Nice Big American Baby - Judy Budnitz - Страница 9

Our friend Joel got one of those mail-order brides. It was all perfectly legitimate: he made some calls, looked through the catalogs, comparison-shopped. He filled out the forms without lying about his income or his height. Where it asked MARITAL STATUS? he wrote Divorced! and When she left me I threw my ring into the sea. “That’s so romantic,” we all said when he did it. “No it wasn’t, it was stupid,” he said. “I could have sold that ring for a lot of money.” We insisted, “No, it’s very romantic.” “Do you think?” “Any woman would want you now,” we said, as we put on bathing suits and diving masks and headed down to the beach.

I’ll call her Nadia. That was not her name, but I’ll call her that to protect her identity. She came from a place where that was necessary. Nadia brings up images of Russian gymnasts. Or is it Romanian? Bulgarian? She had the sad ancient eyes, the strained-back hair, the small knotty muscles. The real Nadia, the famous Nadia, I forget what she did exactly; I have vague memories of her winning a gold medal with a grievous wound, a broken bone, a burst appendix. I think she defected. I picture her running across a no-man’s-land between her country and ours, dressed in her leotard and bare feet, sprinting across a barren minefield where tangles of barbed wire roll about like tumbleweeds and bullets rain down and bounce on the ground like hail.

But our Nadia, Joel’s Nadia, came wrapped as if to prevent breakage in a puffy quilted coat that covered her head to foot. She kept the hood up, the strings drawn tight so all we could see was her snout poking out. She must have been cold when she first came; she stood in his apartment, and wouldn’t take it off, and then went and leaned against the radiator. We were all there to welcome her; we had come bringing beer and wine and flavored vodkas: orange, pepper, vanilla.

It was an old-fashioned radiator and her coat must have been made of some cheap synthetic because it melted to the metal. When she tried to step away and found she couldn’t, she moved in a jerky panicked way that was strangely endearing. Joel tried to help her out of the coat but she wouldn’t let him, she jerked and flailed until the coat ripped open and the filling spilled out. It wasn’t down, it was like some kind of packing material, polystyrene peanuts or shredded paper.

It reminded me—a few months earlier I’d ordered some dishes, and when they came in the mail I found they’d been packed in popcorn, real popcorn. Some companies do this now, I’ve been told, because it’s biodegradable, more environment-friendly. I took out the dishes and wondered if I should eat all that popcorn, but it seemed unsanitary. It might have touched something, I don’t know, at the plant: dust, mouse droppings, the dirty hands of some factory worker. So I threw it away, this big box of popcorn. I still think about it. Probably that box could have fed Nadia’s whole family for a week.

Joel and Nadia had written to each other, their letters filtered and garbled by interpreters. They described themselves: hair, eyes, height, weight, preferences in food, drink, animals, colors, recreations. She could speak English but not write it; they had a few phone conversations. What could they possibly have talked about? What did she say? It was enough to make him pay the money, buy the tickets, sign the papers to bring her over the ocean.

These days, ever since her arrival, Joel looked happy. He had a sheen. Someone had cleaned the waxy buildup from his ears. We asked if she was different from the women here, if she had a way of walking, an extra flap of skin, a special smell. Did she smell of cigarettes, patchouli, foreign sewers, unbathedness?

“I think she has some extra bones in her spine,” he said. “She seems to have a lot of them. Like a string of beads. A rosary.”

We’d seen more of her by then, up close, coatless. Her hair was bright red, black at the roots, which gave her head the look of a tarnished penny.

“Tell us something about her,” we said.

He closed his eyes. “When I take off her shirt,” he said, “her breasts jump right into my hands, asking to be touched.”

He opened his eyes to see how we took that.

“Her nipples crinkle up,” he said, “like dried fruit. Apricots.”

“She has orange nipples?”

We’d always insisted that Joel be completely open with us, tell us everything and anything he would tell a male friend. How could we advise him unless he told us the truth? Utter frankness, we told him, was the basis of any mature friendship between men and women. He often seemed to be trying to test this theory, prove us wrong. “Frankness will be the death of any good relationship,” he’d say.

Joel was what we called a teddy-bear type, meaning he was large and hairy and gentle. He had a short soft beard all around his mouth so you could not see any lips. Hair grew in two bristly patches on the back of his neck. His fingertips were blunt and square, his eyes set far back in his head so that they were hard to read. His knees were knobby and full of personality, almost like two pudgy faces. In fact, he sometimes drew faces on them, to amuse his soccer team or us. Some of us had been in love with him once, but that was long past. Friendship was more important than any illusions of romance.

Nadia did not smile much. At first we thought it was because she was unhappy. Then she began smirking in an awful closed-lipped way so we thought she didn’t like us. It took us a while to understand that it was her smile. Eventually we discovered the reason: her teeth were amazing, gray and almost translucent, evidence of some vitamin deficiency. When she spoke, air whistled through them, giving her a charming lisp.

She spoke English well enough, with a singsong lilting accent that lifted the end of every word, so that each word sounded as if it ended with a curlicue, a kite tail, a question mark.

She trilled certain consonants. “Lovely,” she said and trilled the V. Trilled the V! Have you ever heard that before? She must have had some extra ridges on her tongue.

She burst into tears at unpredictable times. She needed her own bedroom, so he cleared out his home office for her. We saw her bed, a child-sized cot.

We began to suspect that he had done it all purely out of kindness, that he had wanted to rescue someone and give her a better home, a new life. He wanted to be a savior, not a husband. “Why didn’t he just adopt a child, then?” we asked each other.

I thought, Maybe I should adopt a child. I ought to have one of my own; people are always looking at me and saying “childbearing hips” as if it’s a compliment. But then I think of the rabbit my sister had as a pet when we were little girls. I remember holding him tightly to my chest until he stopped kicking. I was keeping him warm, but when I let go he was limp. We put him back in the cage for our father to find. I still dream of white fur, one sticky pink eye. I worry I might do the same to a baby. I could adopt a bigger one, a toddler. Not too sickly. But what if it doesn’t understand English?

Of course you want to help, but what can you do? We did what we could: we gave money to feed overseas orphans, money for artificial limbs and eye operations; we volunteered at local schools; we took meals to housebound invalids once a month; we passed out leaflets on street corners. A friend of mine volunteers to escort women past the protesters into abortion clinics and has invited me to join her, but it’s never a good day for me. We recycle. We get angry and self-righteous about what we see on the news. When I see a homeless person on the street I give whatever’s in my pocket.

It’s not enough. But what can you do? What can you do?

Joel had a friend, Malcolm, he was always promising to introduce us to. Malcolm worked for some global humanitarian organization. We saw him on television occasionally, reporting from some wartorn, decimated, or drought-stricken place, hospital beds in the background, people missing feet with flies clustered on their eyes, potbellied children washing their heads in what looks like a cesspool. Malcolm was balding but handsome in a weather-beaten cowboy way. His earnest face made you want to reach for your wallet. “That guy, he can relief-effort me any time,” we’d say to Joel. But we hadn’t met him yet. We were beginning to suspect he existed only inside the box and was not allowed out.

As for Nadia: “Where’s she from, exactly?” we asked Joel.

“A bad place,” he said, frowning. “Her village is right in the middle of contested territory, every week a new name. Don’t ask her about it. It makes her sad.”

“All right,” we said, but privately we wondered at his protecting her feelings like that. No one we knew had ever stopped talking about something because it made us sad. No one. Not even Joel. Was it because we were fat happy Americans, incapable of real sadness? Was it because he thought we had no feelings, or because he thought we were strong enough to bear sadness? Unlike poor delicate Nadia with her pink-rimmed eyes, Nadia who bought her clothes in the children’s department because she had no hips. She said she did it because the clothes were sturdier, better quality, would last longer.

Last longer? How much longer will she need green corduroy overalls, or narrow jeans with unicorns embroidered on the back pockets? How much longer before her hips swell and her legs thicken and her collarbone stops sticking out in that unbecoming way?

Her legs are not like American legs; they are pieces of string, flimsy and boneless.

“We’ll take her shopping,” we told Joel. “We’ll show her the ropes.”

“She’s doing just fine,” he said. “I’ll take her.”

I said, “You should be careful. I’ve heard, people like her, the first time they go to an American supermarket, they have seizures or pass out.”

“Why?” he said.

“They just can’t take it,” I said. “They’re not used to it. The … the abundance or something. Overstimulation.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at me. Nadia stood at the other end of the room, before a window, so that sunlight set her hair afire and shone right through her pink translucent ears. Her ankles were crossed, her arms folded, a cigarette hung from her fingers. The skin on her face, her arms, was so milky-white her ears didn’t seem to belong to her. Around her people moved in shadows.

“Do you know,” he said, “she lets me hold her hand. In public? Just walking down the street? All the time.”

He was beginning to talk like her, question marks in the wrong places.

“I love her,” he said, in a stupid way. He was talking like one of his moony students. There was something black floating in his drink, next to the ice cube, and he didn’t even notice.

“How do you hold hands?” I said. “Like this?”

“Well … no,” he said. “Usually.… I take her by the wrist. Or grab her thumb. But she doesn’t pull away. She lets me. She likes it.”

“Like this?” I said. “Or like this?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “Her wrist is so little, my fingers go right around … like this, see, only hers are even smaller. I can hold them both in one hand.”

His palm was the same, still warm and damp, fingers long and blunt-tipped, hair on the backs. The hair almost hid the new wedding ring. There were bulgy things in the breast pockets of his shirt. The toe of my shoe was almost touching the toe of his. I wondered if she would look up and see us holding hands like this.

But she didn’t. She was absorbed in her cigarette, her halo of sunlight.

Joel was a high school teacher. He loved kids. People always said that about him, first thing: “He loves kids. Such a nice guy” We had always thought it was a wonderful thing about him; it meant he was caring, he was generous, he was nurturing, he was fun. He would be a terrific father. He taught chemistry; he coached the soccer team. He had won the Teacher of the Year plaque three different times. Kids came to him in tears, they trusted him that much, and he’d let them cry through a box of Kleenex and keep his mouth shut and the classroom door open, and then hand them over to the proper counselor or police officer or health-care worker. There had never been a bit of trouble. Not with the girls, not with anyone.He had perfected the art of the friendly distance, the arm’s-length intimacy. We had always known his girlfriend or wife would never have reason to worry about cheerleaders or teen temptresses. Joel was better than that.

At least, we had never suspected anything of him until he brought home this child bride, who must have weighed half of what he did, who sometimes wore her hair in two long braids. Then we had to wonder. Before, we liked to hear him talk about his students. Now there was something off about it, a sour note. “My kids,” he would say. “I love those kids. Do you know what they did? Stephanie Riser and Ashley Mink? Listen.…”And we would listen, but there was something tainting it now, a thin black thread.

“Don’t you think she’s a little too young?” we said.

“Nadia? No! She’s thirty-three.”

“No!” we said.

‘Yes,” he said, looking pleased.

“She must be lying,” we said. “She can’t be.”

“It’s right on her papers,” he said.

“As if that proves anything,” we said. But we said it nicely.

They bought a house together. What does that mean? He bought the house. It was his money. She contributed nothing. What did she do with herself all day? “She makes me happy,” Joel said. Her?

“She’s trained as a doctor,” he said. “She has to pass a test before she can practice here.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“It’s a source of great frustration. She has to relearn things she studied years ago, chemistry, anatomy, in a new language. You should see the size of these books.”

“Are you going to have children?” we asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

But there was no sign of them. So we kept asking.

“Of course,” he said.

“Later.

“Maybe.

“I don’t know.”

Of course we were really asking something else. We wondered if she had her own bedroom in the new house. But of course we couldn’t ask.

“He seems frustrated,” we told one another. “Yes, definitely. Bottled up.”

One of our old friends was chosen to be on a televised game show. We had a party to watch her and invited Joel and Nadia. We screamed when we saw her, taking her place among flashing lights and boldly punching her buzzer. But by the third question, a sweaty sheen had broken out above her upper lip. She faltered, mumbled, and in seconds she had disappeared forever. It was hard to work up any kind of real feeling; it was just dots on a screen. Only a game.

Joel seemed distracted. Nadia stared at the wall and then got up to use the bathroom.

“You have no idea what she’s been through,” Joel said, apropos of nothing. “You have no idea.”

Which is unfair; we have all known suffering, we have all known loss. Certainly I have, and Joel should have known that better than anyone.

The sun going behind clouds, trees creaking in the wind. The house Joel bought was all windows, making it easier for the weather to force its mood upon them. That’s how I explain the gloom. It was a sunless winter. She decorated the house herself, everything backward: hung rugs on the walls, stood dishes on their rims on the shelves, set table lamps on the floor, left the windows bare but hung curtains round the beds. She used a lot of red for someone so lacking in color.

Whenever we visited now she’d be listening to her own music. She’d found a station, way at one end of the AM dial, that played her type of thing. She’d play it for us if we asked her, to be polite. Horns and bells, nasal voices, songs like sobbing. More often, she’d listen to it on the headphones he’d given her, and he’d talk to us. It was easier this way. She sat among us with a blissful look on her face, and we could talk about her without worrying that she’d hear us.

We saw her country on the news sometimes. Shaky camera, people running. Trucks. Shouting. Crowds of people pulling at one another. Are they using black-and-white film, or is everything gray there? She refused to watch.

“Is she afraid she’ll see someone she knows? Does she want to block it all out? Does she still have family back there?”

“I don’t know,” Joel would say. We could no longer tell when he was lying.

“She doesn’t talk about her family?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s angry at them. Maybe they sold her to the mail-order people and took the money.”

“Maybe,” he said, in the way that meant he was not listening at all.

We could not get the picture out of our heads: Nadia ripped from the arms of … someone. By … someone. That part is hazy. We see the hands reaching out, Nadia crying silently. Women with kerchiefs on their heads weeping, men with huge mustaches looking stern, children hugging her knees. Nadia’s chin upraised, throat exposed, martyr light in her eyes. Her shabby relations counting the money and raising their hands to the heavens in thanks, the starving children already stuffing their mouths with bread. It would make a nice painting, Nadia standing among shadows and grubby faces with a shaft of light falling on her, the way it always does no matter where she stands.

Then again, maybe we’ve seen too many movies. “How do we know her family got the money?” I said. “Maybe she came here to get rich. Maybe she’s the gold digger. Maybe she thought high school teachers make a lot of money.”

I thought he’d be more willing to talk about it alone, without the others. I left work in the afternoon and went to his high school. I found him grading papers with a student sitting on his desk. She was sucking on a lollipop, swinging her legs, looked like a twenty-five-year-old pretending to be fifteen, her tiny rear just inches from Joel’s pen (purple; he said red was too harsh). She knocked her heels against the desk and he looked up.

“To what do I owe this?” he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the inside corners of his eyes. Heavy indentations marked the sides of his nose. His fingers left purply smudges. Ink and exhaustion had bruised his face like a boxer’s. The classroom had the sweaty gym-socks-and-hormones smell of all high schools. On top of that there was an aggressively floral smell that was coming off the girl and a stale, musty, old-man sort of smell that, I realized, was coming from Joel.

“Sondra,” he said, “go wait for your bus outside.”

“Okay, Mr. J,” she said, and slowly got up and fixed her skirt and sauntered out. Her bare thighs left two misty marks on the desk.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” I said, tracing them with my finger.

“You have to know how to handle these kids,” he said. “Sometimes they’re just trying to get your goat, and the best thing to do is ignore them.” He wrote an X on a student’s paper, then scribbled over the X, then circled it, then wrote sorry in the margin.

“I still think—”

“They get bored in five minutes and do something else. Half these kids have ADD. They have the attention span of a fly.”

“I wanted to talk to you about—”

“What? What was that?” He’d gone back to his grading.

If you looked at those few square inches of skin on the nape of his neck, the backs of his ears, you could almost imagine little-boy Joel. A vulnerable angle, looking down at his hunched shoulders and thinning hair. On the desk in front of him, next to a jar full of pens and highlighters, was a tiny snapshot of Nadia set in an oval ceramic frame. The picture was too small and blurry to make out her face. A gesture, that’s all it was, having that photo there, nothing more. Joel’s hands stopped moving. A flush moved along his scalp. He waited.

It’s not a good time, I said, or thought, and left.

Clearly, he was upset. I was worried. We were all worried about Joel. His clothes were limp. He drooped. He yawned constantly. “Is it Nadia?” we said. At first he ignored us. We kept asking. Finally he nodded.

Just as we thought. She was abusing him, demanding things, running him ragged. We knew she had it in her. It’s the quiet shy ones who are the hardest inside. And Joel was too kind; of course he would give in to her. All she had to do was find his sensitive spots and pinch him there. We knew where they were. She could probably find them. They were not hard to find.

But no, he said. He said it wasn’t like that at all. “She’s sad,” he said, “about something. She won’t tell me. It’s killing me to see her so miserable.”

We worried. Why shouldn’t we? He was our friend. We’d known him for a long time, long enough to see changes in him, long enough to still see the face of younger-Joel embedded in the flesh of older-Joel. We had known him when his pores were small, his hair thick, and his body an inverted triangle rather than a pear. Of course we worried. We had a right to.

Joel was lucky to have us. Men need female friends; they need our clear-sightedness, our intuition. And certainly women need male friends as well. The ideal male friend is one you’ve slept with at some point in the past—that way there’s no curiosity, no wondering to taint the friendship.

Joel would not do it, he was too kind to deal with her. We took it upon ourselves. On a day when we knew he was coaching “his kids” at a soccer match, we went to the house. Nadia let us in, offered to make tea. She seemed no more dejected than usual. She was wearing enormous furry slippers shaped like bunnies, her narrow ankles plunged deep in their bellies. Perhaps she was accustomed to wearing dead animals on her feet. She shuffled across the floor, raising a foot to show us. “Funny, no?” she said.

Funny. No.

We sat her down and gave her a talking-to. She kicked off the slippers and sat cross-legged on the sofa, and we gathered around her, holding her hands, knees, shoulders, and got right to it.

“Why are you making Joel unhappy?” we asked her.

“I don’t,” she said. “I make him tea, I make him dinner, I make his bed. I don’t make him unhappy.”

“What’s the trouble,” we asked her. “Are you homesick?”

The end of her nose was turning pink. It was easier than we’d expected.

“You can tell us,” we said. “Tell us anything. Need a shoulder to cry on? A hand to hold? Let it out. Have a good cry.” She kept her head still but her eyes darted back and forth.

“What about children?” we asked. “Don’t you want children?”

“We want children.”

“Joel wants children.”

“Joel wants children.”

“But you don’t.”

“No.…”

“You can’t?”

“No!”

“Are you trying?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t want to have a child?”

“I have child!” she said. She twisted away from us and went to take the teakettle off the stove. We wanted to press further, but we thought she’d said enough. By the time she returned with cups and spoons and the teapot on a tray, we were gathered at the door ready to leave. She carried the tray so easily, she must have had some waitressing experience in her past, we agreed, as we headed up the street. We must have imagined the shatter and skid of china somewhere in the dark house behind us.

Of course we told Joel, and he got it all out of her in his gentle, imploring way. Nadia had a twelve-year-old daughter back in … wherever it was. (I looked it up—one of those places with the devious names that sound nothing like they’re spelled.) Joel told her over and over, he told us over and over, that she shouldn’t have kept it from him, that of course he would welcome her daughter as his own.

Outside of Nadia’s hearing, he hissed that he was furious with us, with what he termed our interfering. Interfering! We’d done it for his own good. For the good of both of them. Frankness, we reminded him, was the basis of any good relationship.

We thought he would want to know what kind of woman his wife really was. How could she do such a thing? Leave her own daughter behind?

Joel didn’t mention—though we suspected he brooded over—the fact that a daughter meant there was a father. Dead? An ex-husband? A current husband? A boyfriend past or present? All men are jealous, even men like Joel. They don’t get jealous the same way women do, but they get jealous all the same.

“We’re going to bring her over,” he told us.

“Who, you?”

“Nadia can’t go; she won’t be able to get out again. I’m going.”

“By yourself?”

“Malcolm can help, maybe,” he said.

“What are you going to do, just go over there and snatch the kid?”

“There must be a legal way to do it,” he said. “And if not.…”

Joel had never been the type to make threats; we were almost inclined to laugh. But now look at him, pounding his fist into his hand, throwing back his shoulders, glaring as if looking for a fight. She had changed him, she had been riding him after all, but in a more insidious way than we’d suspected. She must have sulked and whined and prodded and provoked him into charging back to her backwoods hometown to rescue her brat. Her daughter, whom we imagined as a miniature, even more doll-like version of Nadia.

We still didn’t believe it. Out of those girls’-size-twelve hips? Such a tight squeeze. We pictured a blue and dented baby among gray hospital linen.

Her body—too ungenerous to nurture anything; husband, child. Not like ours. Me, I stand in front of the mirror sometimes, squeezing here and there hard enough to leave pink fingerprints. I imagine people taking bites, here and here and here. I could feed a family of five for a week.

Perhaps Joel’s resoluteness had something to do with the phantom father—perhaps out of jealousy, or out of chivalry, he wanted to track the man down, see him face-to-face. And then what? We liked the idea of it—Joel as hero avenger, toting the twelve-year-old under his arm and facing down a dark-faced stranger—but we couldn’t quite make it work. The picture in our heads looked like Joel manhandling one of his students, getting too rough on the kickball field, overstepping the bounds of discipline. Setting himself up for a lawsuit. The “he’s such a nice guy” refrain would be replaced with “but he seemed like such a nice guy.”

We thought Joel was all bluster, but he did it. He made plans; he bought tickets. Had to get special permission, made shady arrangements. Bought six pairs of Nikes, a dozen pairs of blue jeans. “Gifts.” How did he know what size to get? Sunglasses and a money pouch that strapped around his waist.

I went by the house when he was packing to lend him my kit of outlet adapters. So many different configurations of prong and hole. Neither of us knew which he would need.

“Take them all,” I said. My hands were overflowing. We were alone in the bedroom, suitcase splayed over the bed. I said, “It doesn’t bother you that she has a child? That she loved someone else? Maybe she still thinks about him.”

“She left, didn’t she?” he said. “Everyone deserves a second chance.” He was using the voice he used with his students, brightly chiding.

“Second chance?” I said. “Everyone?”

He walked to the other side of the bed and very studiously folded a T-shirt into a perfect square. “You know, what do I need all these plugs for, anyway? A hair dryer? An electric razor?” He tugged at his beard, just in case I didn’t get it. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

I passed Nadia in the hallway. “Tea?” she said.

“What?” I said. “What? Enunciate, please.”

He went. He left Nadia behind, in the drafty house, which seemed colder than ever in the spring chill. We visited her again; we kept her company in twos and threes; we watched television with her while she listened to her earphones. We noticed bruises on her arms—on her ribs once when she was taking off her sweater and her undershirt rode up. Splotches like handprints. We didn’t ask; we figured she was anemic. It would make sense; she must have grown up malnutritioned. I’ve heard about people like that, they bruise so easily that sitting in a chair leaves them black and blue. You can bruise them by breathing on them.

We didn’t know what Joel was doing over there. He probably didn’t call Nadia either. She showed us a picture of her daughter, but it was an old Polaroid and too faded for us to make out the features. A bleached ghost, with a cat clearly visible in the darkened doorway beyond. Cat’s eyes were red. The ghost’s shoes were untied. Surely, if it was her daughter, she would have tied them before taking the picture? Later we heard that Joel had been befriending journalists, bribing locals, sneaking into places he wasn’t supposed to be.

Of course we saw it on the news, the ugly things that were happening over there, but we didn’t really think that Joel was in the midst of it. There’s a small part of me that wonders if what we see on the news isn’t real, if it’s fabricated, re-enacted. I swear it’s the same shabby group of refugees each time, same line of tanks, the same bandaged heads, even the same flies. Same barbed-wire fences, same hand-dug grave and sloppily wrapped corpse. Same corn-fed private telling the camera he can’t wait to get home to his baby daughter. Same concluding shot of a child’s toy crushed in a soldier’s muddy bootprint. It’s as if all the TV stations are borrowing the same bunch of actors.

Oh, I don’t really think that. I know those things are really happening. I mean, I know now.

We might never have known what happened—Joel would never have told us—if a photojournalist hadn’t been there and snapped a picture. And so Joel had to explain—we read the quotes in the newspapers—how he (and Malcolm, the mysterious Malcolm) had talked to people who sent them to a particular neighborhood where they’d seen the girl on a deserted street and thought she was the right one. Something about the shape of a hand, the tentative, up-on-the-toes walk, the translucent ears? I don’t know. He wasn’t thinking, he said, he just rushed out and grabbed her and then the shooting started.

He said he didn’t know about the snipers on the rooftops, he said he thought the street was deserted. He didn’t realize people were hiding behind locked doors and boarded windows, waiting in their homes, afraid to go out. He didn’t know that only children were sent out to do errands, because a child, being smaller, might have a better chance of dodging bullets. They might not shoot a child.

He said that when he ran out into the street he only wanted to bring the girl home, and when the shooting started he only wanted to protect her. He said he was trying to keep her out of the line of fire, trying to block the bullets. But it’s clear from the photograph, in which he’s looking to one side and gripping to his chest a bundle of hair and dress and dangling legs, that he’s using her body to shield his own.

We saw the photograph, read about it. There’s a dark wet spot on the little girl’s back, you can see Joel’s wedding ring, you can see how bushy his beard’s grown. He’s wearing a hat we’d never seen before, and though the eyes are a smudge you can see his mouth hanging open, slack, completely unmoored.

We wanted to tell Nadia, couldn’t tell Nadia. It wasn’t really our place, we decided. We lacked the vocabulary. I doubt Joel called her. What would he say? She found out somehow, I suppose there were people she could call, family, friends, I suppose she’s not as alone as she seems.

He came back eventually. Returned to the States, that is. He didn’t come to see any of us. We heard he came back without the daughter. Was that because he didn’t find her? Or was that her, the girl in the photograph? It couldn’t be. We told each other that, most likely, he had found the girl, and she’d taken one look at this huge foreign-talking man and decided to stay where she was. Probably she’s happier with her father, we told each other. Probably she has a whole family of her own. We pictured a father, now, who was a counterpoint to Joel: small, graceful, clean-shaven, stouthearted.

Joel avoided us. Fine. We didn’t want to know what he’d brought back with him. Infection. Those diseases they have over there. Odorous invasions of the skin and digestion, diseases of neglect. The ones the travel books warn you about.

I wonder what that’s like. There have been times when I’m sure I’m dying: when my heart flutters in the middle of the night for no reason, when a loneliness or craving is so strong it nauseates me—but of course I’m not. I wonder if living close to the edge of desperation like that makes you feel more alive. It’s a cliché, I know, but most clichés have a core of truth, don’t they? One time I tried to ask Nadia about it—whether she’d felt more alive back there in her homeland with death all around. She didn’t seem to understand the question. She didn’t see a difference between there and here. As if for her it was all the same: Life was perilous everywhere, a teetering tightrope walk from one minute to the next.

We wondered what would happen to Joel and Nadia. Surely they couldn’t go on together? How could he explain it? Even if it wasn’t her daughter, how could he have done such a thing? She wouldn’t be able to stay with him. How could she? She might even go back. Maybe she’d realize that her kind of people demand a sort of heroism she won’t find here.

We felt certain Joel wouldn’t have hidden behind the bodies of our hypothetical daughters. He would have taken a bullet, rather. We all knew this. Nadia and her kind were different, they counted less. They were one degree closer to being objects, to his mind. He might deny it, but actions speak louder, don’t they? In moments of panic, the true self comes to the surface.

And she had abandoned her own daughter. How could they stay together, knowing these ugly truths about each other? So much for frankness.

To be rid of Nadia. Hadn’t that been the intent all along? No one wanted to say it outright, but I will. Yes, it was. But now the prospect of a solitary Joel was no longer appetizing. We knew that, despite the avoidance, Joel was in need of our friendship and pity, probably for the first time. But now we didn’t feel like giving it to him; we wanted to lavish it on someone more worthy.

Suddenly, we didn’t want Nadia to leave.

“Have you seen Nadia?” we asked each other. “He doesn’t let her out,” we said. “He’s holding her hostage in that miserable house.”

We organized a rescue mission. “We’ll break the door down if we have to,” we said. Of course we didn’t have to. Joel opened the door with bowed head. “Where is she?” we said, pushing our way in. We were momentarily distracted; Joel looked like he might tolerate, for once might even welcome, a hug or a kiss on the cheek. We steeled ourselves and pressed on.