Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (9 page)

What kind of cow was it?

Dark brown, infested with ticks, which I got, too.

Your name for her?

My Little Cow, in two or three tongues.

The family who protected you?

Righteous gentiles.

Your parents?

In the camps. My father died. My mother survived. I brought her to this country.

… whose air she could never breathe. Whose slippery words she refused to learn. I myself did not need to study the language; I remembered it from a few centuries earlier, before the expulsion from Spain. Nothing lightened Mama’s mood; she wept every night until she died.

Señora Perera kept these last gloomy facts from interviewers. “The people here—they are like family,” she occasionally said. “Stubborn as pigs,” she once added, in a cracked mutter that no one should have heard, but the woman with the microphone had swooped on the phrase as if it were an escaping kitten.

“You love this sewer,” Olivia had shouted during her raging departure. “You have no children to love, and you have a husband not worth loving, and you don’t love me anymore because my voice is cracking and my belly sags. So you love my land, which I at least have the sense to hate. You love the oily generals. The aristocrats scratching themselves. The intellectuals snoring through concerts. The revolutionaries in undershirts. The parrots, even! You are besotted!”

It was a farewell worthy of Olivia’s talents. Their subsequent correspondence had been affectionate. Olivia’s apartment in Israel would become Señora Perera’s final home; she’d fly straight to Jerusalem from Miami. The diamonds would support a few years of simple living. But for a little while longer she wanted to remain amid the odors, the rap blaring from pickup trucks, the dance halls, the pink evangelical churches, the blue school uniforms, the high-way’s dust, the river’s tarnish. To remain in this wayward place that was everything a barn was not.

L
UIS WAS WAITING
for her at dawn, standing beside the limousine. He wore a mottled jumpsuit.

“Much trouble last night?” she asked, peering in vain into his sunglasses while trying to avoid his corrupt breath.

“No,” he belched, omitting her title, omitting even the honorific. This disrespect allowed her to get into the front of the car like a pal.

At the airport they climbed the steps of a tipsy little plane. Luis stashed his Uzi in the rear next to the medical supplies. He took the copilot’s seat. Señora Perera and the nurse—a Dutch volunteer with passable Spanish—settled themselves on the other two buckets. Señora Perera hoped to watch the land fall away, but from behind the pilot’s shoulder she could see only sky, clouds, one reeling glimpse of highway, and then the mountainside. She reconstructed the city from memory: its mosaic of dwellings enclosed in a ring of hills, its few tall structures rising in the center like an abscess. The river, the silly Parisian bridge. The plaza. People were gathering there now, she guessed, to hear today’s orations.

The Dutch nurse was huge, a goddess. She had to hunch her shoulders and let her big hands dangle between her thighs. Some downy thatch sprouted on her jaw; what a person to spend eternity with if this light craft should go down, though there was no reason you should be stuck forever with the dullard you happened to die with. Señora Perera planned to loll on celestial pillows next to Olivia. Federico might join them every millennium or so, good old beast, and Gidalya, too, prince of rabbis released from his avian corpus, his squawks finally making sense … She offered her traveling flask to the nurse. “Dutch courage?” she said in English. The girl smiled without comprehension, but she did take a swig.

In less than an hour they had flown around the mountain and were landing on a cracked tar field. A helicopter stood waiting. Señora Perera and the nurse used the latrine. A roll of toilet paper hung on a nail, for their sakes.

And now they were rising in the chopper. They swung across the hide of the jungle. She looked down on trees flaming with orange flowers and trees foaming with white ones. A sudden clearing was immediately swallowed up again by squat, broad-leaved trees. Lime green parrots rose up together—Gidalya’s rich cousins.

They landed in the middle of the town square, beside a chewed bandstand. A muscular functionary shook their hands. This was Señor Rey, she recalled from Lina’s instructions. Memory remained her friend; she could still recite the names of the cranial nerves. Decades ago, night after night, she had whispered them to the cow. She had explained the structures of various molecules.
Ma Petite Vache
… She had taught the cow the Four Questions.

Señor Rey led them toward a barracks mounted on a slab of cement: the infirmary she had come to inspect. The staff—a nurse-director and two assistants—stood stiffly outside as if awaiting arrest. It was probable that no member of any government had ever before visited—always excepting smugglers.

The director, rouged like a temptress, took them around the scrubbed infirmary, talking nonstop. She knew every detail of every case history; she could relate every failure from under-medication, from wrong medication, from absence of medication. The Dutch girl seemed to understand the rapid-fire Spanish.

Surgical gloves, recently washed, were drying on a line. The storeroom shelves held bottles of injectable ampicillin and jars of Valium—folk remedies now. A few people lay in the rehydration room. In a corner of the dispensary a dying old man curled upon himself. Behind a screen Señora Perera found a listless child with swollen glands and pale nail beds. She examined him. A year ago she would have asked the parents’ permission to send him to a hospital in the city for tests and treatment if necessary. Now the hospital in the city was dealing with wounds and emergencies, not diseases. The parents would have refused anyway. What was a cancer unit for but to disappear people? She stood for a moment with her head bowed, her thumb on the child’s groin. Then she told him to dress himself.

As she came out from behind the screen she could see the two nurses through a window. They were walking toward the community kitchen to inspect the miracle of soya cakes. Luis lounged just outside the window.

She leaned over the sill and addressed his waxy ear. “Escort those two, why don’t you? I want to see Señor Rey’s house alone.”

Luis moved sullenly off. Señor Rey led her toward his dwelling in resentful silence. Did he think she really cared whether his cache was guns or cocaine? All she wanted was to ditch Luis for a while. But she would have to subject this village thug to a mild interrogation just to get an hour’s freedom.

And then she saw a better ruse. She saw a motorbike, half concealed in Señor Rey’s shed.

She had flown behind Federico on just such a bike, one summer by the sea. She remembered his thick torso within the circle of her arms. The next summer she had driven the thing herself, Olivia clasping her waist.

“May I try that?”

Señor Rey helplessly nodded. She handed him her kit bag. She hiked up her skirt and straddled the bike. The low heels of her shoes hooked over the foot pieces.

But this was not flying. The machine strained uphill, held by one of the two ruts they called a road. On the hump between the ruts grass grew and even flowers—little red ones. She picked up speed slightly and left the village behind. She passed poor farms and thick growths of vegetation. The road rose and fell. From a rise she got a glimpse of a brown lake. Her buttocks smarted.

When she stopped at last and got off the bike, her skirt ripped with a snort. She leaned the disappointing machine against a scrub pine and walked into the woods, headed toward the lake. Mist encircled some trees. Thick roots snagged her shoes. But ahead was a clearing, just past tendrils hanging from branches. A good place for a smoke. She parted the vines and entered, and saw a woman.

A girl, really. She was eighteen at most. She was sitting on a carpet of needles and leaning against a harsh tree. But her lowered face was as untroubled as if she had been resting on a silken pouf. The nursing infant was wrapped in coarse striped cloth. Its little hand rested against her brown breast. Mother and child were outwardly motionless, yet Señora Perera felt a steady pulsing beneath her soles, as if the earth itself were a giant teat.

She did not make much of a sound, only her old woman’s wheeze. But the girl looked up as if in answer, presenting a bony, pockmarked face. If the blood of the conquistadors had run in her ancestors’ veins, it had by now been conquered; she was utterly Indian. Her flat brown eyes were fearless.

“Don’t get up, don’t trouble yourself …” But the girl bent her right leg and raised herself to a standing position without disturbing the child.

She walked forward. When she was a few feet away from Señora Perera, her glance caught the diamonds. She looked at them with mild interest and returned her gaze to the stranger.

They faced each other across a low dry bush. With a clinician’s calm Señora Perera saw herself through the Indian girl’s eyes. Not a grandmother, for grandmothers did not have red hair. Not a soldier, for soldiers did not wear skirts. Not a smuggler, for smugglers had ingratiating manners. Not a priest, for priests wore combat fatigues and gave out cigarettes; and not a journalist, for journalists piously nodded. She could not be a deity; deities radiated light. She must, then, be a witch.

Witches have authority. “Good that you nurse the child,” Señora Perera said.

“Yes. Until his teeth come.”

“After his teeth come, chica. He can learn not to bite.” She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue and placed her forefinger on its tip. “See? Teach him to cover his teeth with his tongue.”

The girl slowly nodded. Señora Perera mirrored her nod. Jew and Indian: Queen Isabella’s favorite victims. Five centuries later, Jews were a great nation, getting richer. Indians were multiplying, getting poorer. It would be a moment’s work to unfasten the pin and pass it across the bush. But how would the girl fence the diamonds? Señor Rey would insist on the lion’s share; and what would a peasant do with money, anyway—move to the raddled capital? Señora Perera extended an empty hand toward the infant and caressed its oblivious head. The mother revealed a white smile.

“He will be a great man,” the señora promised.

The girl’s sparse lashes lifted. Witch had become prophetess. The incident needed only a bit of holy nonsense for prophetess to become lady. “He will be a great man,” Señora Perera repeated, in Polish, stalling for time. And then, in Spanish again, with the hoarseness that inevitably accompanied her quotable pronouncements, “Suckle!” she commanded. She unhooked the pin. With a flourishing gesture right out of one of Olivia’s operettas, conveying tenderness and impetuousness and authority too, she pressed the diamonds into the girl’s free hand. “Keep them until he’s grown,” she hissed, and she turned on her heel and strode along the path, hoping to disappear abruptly into the floating mist as if she had been assumed.
Penniless exile crawls into Jerusalem
, she thought, furious with herself.

When she reached the motorbike, she lit the postponed cigarette and grew calm again. After all, she could always give Spanish lessons.

S
EÑOR
R
EY WAS WAITING
in front of his shed. He clucked at her ripped skirt. And Luis was waiting near the helicopter, talking to the pilot. He gave the unadorned lapel a hard stare. The Dutch nurse would stay until next Saturday, when the mail Jeep would arrive. So it was just the three of them, Luis said. She wondered if he would arrest her in the chopper, or upon their arrival at the airstrip, or in the little plane, or when they landed at the capitol, or not until they got to her apartment. It didn’t matter; her busybody’s career had been honorably completed with the imperative uttered in the clearing. Suckle. Let that word get around—it would sour all the milk in the country, every damned little jar of it.

And now—deportation? Call it retirement. She wondered if the goons had in mind some nastier punishment. That didn’t matter, either; she’d been living on God’s time since the cow.

T
HERE WERE FIVE APARTMENTS
in the house on Deronda Street. There were five mailboxes in the vestibule: little wooden doors in embarrassing proximity, like privies.

Nobody liked to be seen there—not the middle-aged widower, not the Moroccan family, not the three old ladies.

The widower got too few letters.

The Moroccans got too many, all bills.

The soprano got some, enough, too much, too little; what did quantity matter. Every concert series in Jerusalem had her name on its list. Do-good societies would not leave her in peace. But the one letter she craved rarely appeared, and when it did come it was only a thin blue square, as if it had been first ironed and then frozen. She extended her palm, the missive floating on it. Decades ago she had indicated with the same gracious gesture, after sufficient applause, that her accompanist might now take a bow. The letter weighed less than a peseta; inside would be perhaps four uninformative sentences in a jumble of Polish and Spanish. She might as well burn it unopened. Chin high, eyes dry, she climbed the stairs.

Tamar, who lived with her grandmother across the hall from the soprano, picked up their mail on her way home from school. Unlike the others, she didn’t care who saw her correspondence. She was seventeen. Her parents, in the United States on an extended sabbatical, wrote once a week. A great number of elderly Viennese who had fetched up on other shores wrote to her grandmother. But her grandmother didn’t like to go to the mailboxes, or anywhere else for that matter. When Tamar’s grandmother did go out—to exhibits, to lectures, to the market—she did so because as a woman of cultivation she was obliged to transcend her dislike of society, though not to conceal it.