Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

  It was another matter with Cheryl.

  She lived on the second floor of a low-rise apartment building that overlooked a deep ravine. When I started to pull toward the front doors where the taxis would come and go, she told me the visitor parking was in back. “If you want to,” she said, and put her hand on mine. “It would be okay.”

  And so I came to Cheryl’s apartment. It was not much larger than mine, but she had made it far more pleasant. The television, the sofa, even the pictures on the walls—everything seemed new. The window gave a tantalizing view of the ravine through tree branches, and hid the view of the other high rises that grew from the far bank. It was as though she lived on the edge of a deep forest.

  “You like?” she asked from behind me. I said that I did. She reached around and took my hand—and truly, I was not surprised when she placed it on her naked hip. I turned and saw that her dress was abandoned, sloughed off like a skin, on the floor behind her.

  “You are very beautiful,” I said as she withdrew, and she laughed—softly now—and for an instant turned away.

  “You don’t believe me?” I said, and she answered, “No. But you’re a pretty liar,” and the instant passed, and she kissed me once more.

  “Oh God, forgive me,” she said as she reached down and fumbled with my belt buckle. I reached to help her, but she batted my hand away and finished the work, bent down and yanked my trousers to my knees. I stumbled a bit, and at that she laughed, and pushed, and I fell back, landing hard on my behind just short of the sofa.

  Cheryl did not ask for my forgiveness. She laughed, fell to her hands, crawled forward so her face hung over mine, grinning like a mountain cat’s. She moaned low. I kicked off my shoes, my trousers. She descended upon me. And in this way we copulated, swaying and growling as if to the rhythms of the old chants, on the thin carpet over her apartment’s hard concrete floor.

  I wrote down the number of my mobile before I left Cheryl’s apartment that afternoon, but she told me not to expect a call.

  “You got to go,” she said, her voice flat, when she finally came out of the washroom. She had clothed herself in light blue track pants and a sweater. Her feet, still bare, never lifted far off the floor as she led me to the door. I didn’t hear her crying, not once that day, but her eyes were red and wet. Perhaps I should have apologized, although for what I could not fathom. So I said all I could think of—

  “You are beautiful.”

  —which only enraged her. She shouted at me to get out, called me names, waved her fists, but I put my hands up in surrender and told her I would leave if that was what she wished. This placated her, and Cheryl stood, huffing and swallowing and glaring, as I gathered myself and hurried into the dim corridor.

  I ate lunch with Ruman on Monday but we did not talk about very much. He did thank me for joining him at the congregation, or more properly, for the ride there, but he said he wouldn’t need another; he’d made an arrangement with Rose. He didn’t, thankfully, ask me if I’d enjoyed myself at the service or afterwards, and I didn’t ask him. I made one feeble joke—biting into my apple, peering at the pulp I announced, “No face today.” Ruman just shook his head and waved the little blasphemy away with the flat of his hand.

  On Tuesday, Ruman brought a Bible with him and made it clear he preferred its company to mine. So I ate quietly, this one last time, at the same table as he, dipping his bread in soup as he thumbed the pages of his book. Did he smile as he read, or was I tricked by the way the overhead fluorescents cast shadows across his lips? I did not stay long enough, or look hard enough, to be sure. On Wednesday, I ate alone.

  By Friday, the supervisors had responded to my request to join the evening shift.

  In the beginning, the sun set an hour after I started work, and as the nights lengthened, darkness encompassed all my days.

  Viktor was glad to see me.

  “We should work the night all the time!” he said. “It’s cool in the summer, and just as warm as day in the winter. And leaving that aside—it suits us, yes?—this peaceful time.”

  Viktor was right. There was work to be done, and we saw to it; but the urgency of the place . . . it was muted. When the trucks had pulled away, and one was moving the merchandise to and from its places . . . one might take a moment, listen to the sound of one’s footsteps, and stop beneath high lights that only, at best, kept the shadows at bay. One might feel enveloped. Protected.

  At home.

  We ate together all the time, Viktor and I. And absent Ruman, we found we had things to say to one another. Viktor had once had a wife, and still had a son by her, a boy of fifteen, of whom he was very proud.

  “His name is William,” Viktor said as he showed me a photograph. William resembled Viktor inasmuch as he resembled any of us: thick black hair, a small mouth with lips bright red, on which formed a small and unpractised smile. The mark was on him too, but fainter than any of ours. “He is a wizard with machinery. And popular with the girls. The most important thing!”

  That was the first time I tried to talk with Viktor about that Sunday, the church, Cheryl. But I didn’t want to seem boastful, comparing my prowess with that of a teenaged boy.

  The second time was during the election that year, when Viktor and two other fellows were talking about one of the candidates—an unworldly woman who professed to have been saved by Jesus Christ, and during a debate had mispronounced the name of our homeland. Had it just been Viktor and I, perhaps I might have spoken of my afternoon with unworldly Christian women. But these other fellows . . . I couldn’t even keep their names in my head. I didn’t want them smirking at my adventures.

  We finally spoke of it much later, when, during a break in late October, my mobile chirped and, answering it, I found myself talking with Cheryl’s friend, Carrie. Viktor asked me who calls at such an hour as this, and I shushed him.

  “I got this number from Cheryl’s kitchen,” she said.

  “Is Cheryl there now?”

  “Cheryl doesn’t know I’m calling you. She’s . . . no, she’s not here now.”

  Carrie’s voice was tight. I didn’t know her well enough to be sure, but in another woman I would suspect it indicated tears. Or perhaps anger.

  “Where is she? What’s wrong?”

  “She’s . . . she’s at Rose’s place. With the rest of them.” And a pause, and a deep, sobbing breath. And then, sharper: “I just thought you should know.”

  And at that, she disconnected. Viktor raised his eyebrows. “Well,” he said. “There is a story behind that.”

  And so I told Viktor the tale of my visit to the Good News Happening Congregation, and the pancake lunch, and the visit to Cheryl’s apartment. He listened quietly the whole time, and sat still a moment when I finished.

  “And you fucked,” he said finally.

  “And then—yes.”

  He held out his hand, and snapped his fingers. “Give me the phone.”

  I handed it over. After some fiddling, Viktor extracted Carrie’s number. He leaned back in his plastic chair, crossed ankles, and when she picked up, didn’t even pause to introduce himself before launching into questions:

  “Where is Rose’s house? Address please. Hold on.” He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket, leaned forward in his chair. “And telephone number?” He scribbled on a napkin. “How long has he been there? . . . How many others? . . . And you? . . . I see . . . No, don’t go yourself. . . .” And finally, a longer pause, during which Viktor capped the pen, replaced it in his shirt pocket, and stood.

  “Pray if you like,” he said, and snapped the mobile shut, handing it back to me.

  “Carrie asked me to apologize for being angry with you,” he said. “She is under some strain. Our friend Ruman has moved into Rose’s house, and so has Cheryl now.”

  I could think of nothing to say.

  “So tell me,” he finally went on. “Is your terrible death-trap of a car st
ill running well tonight?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “Well.” He looked at the break-room clock. “We finish in two hours. It can wait till then, but not much longer.”

  In Radejast, Viktor explained to me, those who worship do so quietly.

  “You can be forgiven for not knowing,” said Viktor as we pulled from the parking lot into the deep morning dark, “for you are younger. Your parents . . . they would not have remembered the purges, the reform . . . they themselves would have been only small children, infants perhaps, through the worst of the Copper Revolution.”

  “They were not even that,” I said. “Not even born.”

  Viktor rubbed his beard and nodded. “It’s been many years,” he said. “And more than lives were lost, hey?” He chuckled when I didn’t answer. “It used to be that everyone worshipped. I remember my grandmother told me how at the Harvest, the whole of the land would wait, quiet as mice, as the sun vanished below the western mountains, and the moon, new and dark, rose invisible over the fields. And then, we all would creep from our homes to the churches, and there in the pitch black of night—whisper our supplication. And then—and only then—under cover of the blackest piece of the night—would we dare celebrate the invincible shadow of our Lord.”

  We stopped a moment waiting for a traffic light to turn. Viktor shifted in his seat, so he leaned against the car door.

  “What a temptation, though—for any man or woman—to look directly into the brightly lit face of their God. Whatever God that may be. The people here seem to have no difficulty with it, by and by. But us? In the old days at least, we knew our God well enough to know better.”

  I touched the accelerator and the car lurched into the intersection some seconds before the light turned green. “Whoa, whoa!” shouted Viktor, but it was safe. At this time of night, in this part of the world, we two Radejastians were the only souls in sight.

  Rose’s house was in a neighbourhood not so different, indeed not so very far, from the one where Ruman had rented his room. The house, however, was larger, newer, and far better kept. The grass had been cut. Leaves were neatly raked and put at the end of the driveway, in a half-dozen orange bags made to look like pumpkins. An enormous spiderweb spread over the front windows, and two figures—one a plastic skeleton, and another, a crude mannequin made from straw—flanked the front door.

  Although it was just past three in the morning, the house blazed with light.

  “What do you mean for us to do?” I asked as I pulled the car against the curb.

  “You have done enough,” Viktor said, and opened the car door. “Be prepared to drive off quickly when I return.”

  I did as I was told, but as Viktor strode up to the front of the house, I began to worry. For as he got out of the car, he had pulled something from his pocket, and I had heard a click sound. And as I thought of it, the sound reminded me of the sound a board-cutting knife from the warehouse might make, as the blade extended. And didn’t such a blade flash in the porch light as the front door opened and Viktor slipped inside?

  So I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, and thought, and thought again. And I got out of the car, and followed in Viktor’s footsteps, up to the house.

  The front door was not wide open but had not been properly shut either. I paused a moment, listening, and what I heard put me at ease: women’s voices, talking at a reasonable level and even showing some cheer.

  And so: inside, I stepped.

  First, a vestibule. On one side, a coat rack, and a closet. On the other, a small, dark, wooden table beneath a hat rack.

  And there, I saw a thing which made me less at ease: a twelve-inch-high doll swaddled in bright red cloth, its venerable face carved from a dried apple. Tiny black-headed pins were its eyes.

  I hurried past, into a high room with a wide staircase curving to the second floor. Past the stairs: a brightly lit kitchen. It was from there that the conversation came, still convivial. Was that Rose’s voice? And that, Cheryl’s?

  I was set to go see, when a door I had not noticed opened at the base of the stairs.

  “Trick or treat? It’s early for—Oh, it’s you!”

  It was Lisa. Her black hair was tied in a tight bun behind her head; her pale cheeks flushed red; she wore a bone-white blouse and long red skirt that fell to her calves. She stepped into the vestibule and turned an oddly graceless pirouette.

  She recovered her balance and beamed at me.

  “You like?” she said, eyes wide, and turned again, this time with more agility. And at the end of it, she was somehow closer, and her eyes were wider—and I could not but think of the forest beyond Cheryl’s balcony, and Cheryl’s own eyes as they stared down at me. I took two steps back, and Lisa laughed and raised her arms over her head, and turned and swayed and was at my side again and somehow she was holding both my hands in hers and then we two were turning in the bright light of the entry hall, under the black clouds over Radejast, she stumbling . . . both of us, finding our feet . . . dancing the dance of the virgins.

  Lisa flew far from me and drew close, her eyes—so round now they seemed lidless—never leaving mine. She never stood close long. But we were entwined.

  Behind her, behind me, figures gathered. First one coming from the kitchen: Rose perhaps? The hair was the right colour, but I remembered the dress too well. In its absence, how would I account this pale naked creature, swaying beneath the stairs, hands in the air, as she came toward us? Or that other, face pinched tight—open hands slapping against her breasts, red hair plastered over swollen cheeks? Who might she be?

  Cheryl, now. She was unmistakable. I remembered the curve of her thighs, her breasts . . . her narrow wrists and long fingers, clawing at the air as she swayed. I didn’t need to see her face. I couldn’t see her face. For she wore a mask of woven straw, its eyes and mouths dark circles, its high crown making a giantess of her.

  And we turned, and she was gone.

  The women clapped in rhythm, and Lisa drew in close to me, and I bent closer to her, mouth hungry—but she whipped back from my lips, turning so hard and sharply that I feared her neck might have snapped. For an instant, I was looking at the tightly wound bun of hair at the back of her skull, even as her young breasts pressed hard against my ribs. As I wondered at this, her head finished the circle, and those mad, reeling eyes took hold of mine again. She did kiss me then. She tasted of smoke. Of the earth. Of soot.

  The clapping stopped. The women looked up, eyes as round as the virgin’s. And I felt a jolt—like a tiny tremor of the earth—up my spine.

  Lisa let me go. The women were staring past me, and down, and up . . . and I put my hands out, palms up. It seemed as though it were snowing.

  But it wasn’t snow. Plaster and paint were falling from the high ceiling above us. I half-turned and saw on the floor behind me: Viktor. The hair on his skull was matted with blood and torn scalp. His neck was bent at a deadly angle. His right hand, turned in, gripped in a tight fist. His back was covered in white plaster dust—the same that was falling now, from the long cracks in the high ceiling, where a man might have impacted.

  He was not moving. If the first fall had not done the job, then the second had surely finished him.

  Lisa knelt down and lifted his hand, unbent his fingers. She drew the box cutter Viktor had brought, and lifted it high, turned to the stairway.

  “Ruman,” I gasped, unable to take my eyes off the creature that stood on the curving steps, “look at you.”

  He did not speak. He raised his blackened arms, and lifted off his mask, and began his howling.

  Lisa turned to me, but this time I looked away. And alone, I fled the house, and back to the bosom of the early-morning darkness.

  I went to work the next evening. The supervisors were uneasy; they could smell the changes, the thickening dark, the same as everyone. Where was Viktor? they asked. He didn’t call. Was he sick? Did you driv
e him home? Drunk perhaps?

  I didn’t answer their questions, the same way I didn’t contact the police. What would I say? What good would it do?

  The night after that, Ruman took Viktor’s place on the night shift. He found me at the meal break, and grinned as he pulled the chair out, fell into it in a happy exhaustion.

  “She’s pretty, yes?” he said. “Little girls get big fast.”

  I didn’t look at him. There were so many things I might have said. “You have a wife,” was all I finally could muster.

  “Several, in fact,” he said, and laughed. “Praise Be He.”

  The next night, and every night thereafter, I stayed home.

  As the weeks drew on, the darkness grew over the city. Snow, real snow, swirled in corners, and gathered, covering the smooth pavement and neatly laid brickwork, thickening that darkness.

  But sometimes, for hours at a time, the darkness broke, and daylight intervened.

  It was at one of these times, three weeks before the solstice, that I ventured out of my apartment, and took my car to the Good News Happening Congregation.

  The cross still climbed high over the motorway, but someone had rolled the sign away. This time, I was able to find a space in the parking lot. Indeed, there were barely a dozen other vehicles there, stopped at the end of wide curves of tire tracks in the snow. All the doors in the wide glass bank of them on the building were locked but one. I slipped inside.

  The last time I had been in the Good News Happening Congregation, the hall’s wide floor was covered in rows of folding chairs, and those chairs were filled with happy, fervent worshippers.

  The Congregation was long gone. As I crossed the vast, dark floor, empty but for scuffed pamphlets and, here and there, shallow puddles, I wondered at where those people had found themselves. Did they gather their money together, flee to somewhere brighter, one or two of them at first, then, once established, slowly draw their kin in tow?