Strawberry Fields Read online

  When he didn’t thank me in turn I was furious.

  Let me get you home, he said. I protested. But although I meant to stay and get quotes, seize this new story, instead I followed where he led, his hand still tight on my arm. I’ll write in the trailer, I thought, make some calls. I was exhausted.

  I had sweat through both my shirts and so had he.

  We walked at least another mile in the heat. Even on the sidewalk he kept his hand on the small of my back.

  Whittier Park, I said, as we got into his car.

  Are you all right? he said, looking at my legs, where bruises were beginning to flower and throb in the air conditioning.

  I’m fine, I said.

  Someone should tell those boys they’re not in Baghdad anymore, I said.

  Modigliani nodded.

  Are you a cop of some kind? I said.

  Yes, he said, and tried to smile.

  Modigliani was almost handsome back then, his oversized eyes best flattered by a few days’ beard.

  I don’t remember our conversation. The whole time I wanted to understand whether he was thinking of himself as some kind of hero, extending the necessary chivalry by accompanying me home; or if in fact he was grateful, and even embarrassed to be grateful, having noted the rubber bullet aimed in his direction might have made contact, it seemed to me, somewhere around his neck, in which case this consideration was an attempt to acknowledge and pay back his debt to me.

  When we arrived at the park, he left the car in the least muddy stretch by the road and we began the long walk trailerward, around us people sitting under makeshift awnings, working on laptops or eating McDonald’s out of bags that would soon join the carpet of mud and fast-food wrappers. Others were lined up for the solar showers by the scrubby woods to the east. Modigliani and I walked in the same direction a while before it occurred to me I could let him off the hook, and I pointed at my trailer and said:

  That’s me right there.

  I guess we’re roommates, he said, and his tone failed to reveal whether this was news to him.

  After a pause I said: Thought I recognized your T-shirt.

  I’ve been meaning to pick up a new pack, he said, and we ascended the steps to the trailer. A few minutes later, clothes changed but face still pale, he headed back out. I had washed my face and was sitting on my cot watching my bruises color. See you later, he said.

  I nodded and started to thank him again but cut myself off.

  After he left I took a look in his bag: some shirts and pants, folded, a few nutritional bars, and a set of headphones, nothing to plug them into.

  I ate one of the bars.

  When Modigliani tells the story, he doesn’t mention Xenith, the rubber bullets, the hundreds who tried to run. He begins with the two of us approaching the trailer from two directions, meeting at last, already roommates for weeks, at its door. In his story our surprise is mutual; whenever he tells it he slides a hand over my elbow.

  Grigory

  On the third day after the protests reached the wall they said a child had been shot. The video arrived in my email: you seen this yet??? You spoken to Tal today? Miriam asked from the kitchen, no need to answer, she was already dialing and I picked up the extension in my study. Tal was at his office, like always—I’m at the office, he said, what do you want? Are you all right? we said. Come stay with us, we said, till the protests are over. You always act like we’re so far, but we’re not far. Stop worrying, Dad, he said—and Dad is not what he called me as a child, but what his children call him. The protests had begun deep in the territories, then spread to the cities, right past Tal’s doorstep, and now had reached the border, where tens of thousands were rioting by the wall. It was not far. According to the news the father of the dead child was not a thrower of stones. They say he had been hiding with his son behind a parked car. First of all, there is no way to know they weren’t throwing stones just before they hid. I watched the video at night, wearing Tal’s old headphones, so as not to disturb Miriam. They will insist that neither father nor son were throwing stones, but the video only begins with the man and the boy crouched low by the wheel of a car. We do not see the boy’s face. The man wears what could be a traditional headscarf or could have been meant to protect him from tear gas, if he were among the rioters. In the video it is difficult to tell what might be happening at any moment. And if a camera’s vantage point can be so unclear, think of each soldier, trying to act in the midst of this chaos, what could anyone even see? When as a young man I walked down the hallway of my university, everyone turned toward me, toward my covered head. I was smart, very good in school, but Tal, who knows nothing of this life, was born decades later and in another country, another world, Tal once told me that according to history books the quota system did not mean they let in the best, on the contrary they let in those they thought would fail, in order to decrease the quota further, based on those poor performances. He is wrong, he does not know everything. In the country of my birth there was no better technical university and I was admitted and I did not fail. The video has run to its end again and I drag the cursor back to the midpoint, the point at which it appears that the car begins to sustain fire, at least the sound of something like gunfire grows louder, the car jolts, unless it is only the camera shuddering, but the father is looking around wildly, pulling his son and himself into the wheelbase, then pointing, saying something into the ear of the boy. And then they rise, the son first and the father behind, meaning to shield him. But the bullet that strikes the boy comes from the side. What you cannot forget is that you are not seeing this, not truly, someone is filming it. Someone who is presumably somewhere safer than on this street, in a building nearby and not in the thick of the rioters throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, the soldiers besieged. Someone in some sort of window has chosen to film this man and this boy, and with a fairly steady hand, as though aware that of all the events in the territories these weeks, this one, this street, would be the single event of significance, or at least this is what this person, this foreign woman journalist (as she says she is), wants to ensure. What you see on the screen is the boy thrust sideways, then crumpling. His clothes are reddened, as are the hands of the father, who pauses there, a few yards from the car, as though he were not in danger, and in embracing the boy he turns his hands toward the sky and cries out. That is when whoever is holding the camera seems to move out from behind it, the lens falling to the side, and at this rotated view the boy although fallen appears for a moment to be upright, then the camera jerks once more and the recording is over. The whole thing is easily faked, everyone knows this. The gunfire could have been real, or not. We see only the car and the man and the boy, we have no way of knowing how near the gunfire is—the other end of a block, or a street over, or it could all have been simulated, either digitally or at the scene. Furthermore even if the location were real we do not see any soldiers, we do not see who fires the bullet that hits the boy. How do we know this isn’t just more of the violence inborn to the territories, them shooting their own and blaming our soldiers as always? The voice behind the camera tells us it is soldiers who are firing. But this is not proof. The camera’s focus is so precise—the car, the man, the boy—nothing could be identified from the scene, no exact location. They say the boy, eight years old, died en route to the hospital. But there would be records of this, hospital records, Miriam will say when I argue all this to her. She will say, surely you could know whether a boy is dead. She will address me in the usual manner: one hand fusses with something, the other is turned toward the ceiling. A boy could have died, I will tell her, but they could have chosen any boy who died yesterday of anything and said that he was this boy in the video and the soldiers shot him. Then their son could die a martyr, this is what they want. But none of this will occur, I will not show the video clip to Miriam, who as soon as it loaded and she heard the gunfire and the camerawoman’s screaming, would say, Oh why
do you make me watch these things? Isn’t it enough, she would say, as if anyone could know what she was referring to. She goes online rarely—never, to my knowledge, and although everyone is circulating this clip and several news sites have posted it, she will not see it unless I play it for her. And a hundred kilometers away Tal is always online, as are his children, which Miriam and I have tried to discuss with him, but we are outdated, he says. All the same, he must have ways to keep the children from seeing such things as this: fake or no, a film of a boy dying. But they live in the territories, what all they must see. We’re completely safe, Dad, Tal says, the town is safe, we’re in a good neighborhood, the kids have been in the pool every day, there’s nothing to worry about. It is true that they are in the middle of town, and the nearest border is protected with a barbed wire fence and a guard tower where snipers can be stationed or perhaps these days always are. But these days that does not always seem like enough. I drag the bar back to the starting point and load the video again. One email with which I received it came with a list of time markers at which to click pause and read descriptions of how this instant was obviously falsified. The descriptions are often more than two paragraphs each, although the video is only two minutes and forty-one seconds long. It is enough, just to know how easily it could be faked. We cannot trust anything that’s called news. Which, actually, makes this country not unlike where I was born, where the news was the world’s longest joke, something whose relation to the truth you could understand only by a sort of mirror imaging: once you knew what the story wished you to believe, you could determine what the opposite of that belief was, which could then be deduced to be the logical conclusion of whatever events had in fact occurred (though their details would usually remain a mystery forever). This was a skill I learned as a young man, I said aloud in the study, Miriam was asleep. A lesson Tal’s children will learn too. Although the technology is now so good, I can hardly believe it. It is to be hoped that no boy died at all, that even the records could be faked. That when the camera falls to the side and shuts off, a cue is shouted, and the boy rises.

  Alice

  I was not even thinking about the veterans when I saw him. Bill LeRoy, head of Xenith, sitting alone in the window of a little trattoria. His oversized arms looked cartoonish in a suit, moving pane to oil to mouth. I looked at him and for a second believed the reflection of my face superimposed over his was born not of the window glass but the sheen of his head. I went in.

  Mr. LeRoy, I said, lowering myself into a chair. I had unbuttoned one more blouse button on my way in.

  I’m afraid I don’t recall your name, he said.

  I was in Hibiscus Square, I said, and at the settlement meeting where you spoke so eloquently—hearing myself I acknowledged the tragic lack of a better line. I extended a hand: Alice—

  Reporter, he said, I remember. He gestured across the restaurant, and my ejection was imminent.

  Would you care to comment on the murders of two of your employees, Sergei Kovarovic and Jonathan Silverman?

  I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed, he said. These men were with the military, not with us.

  After their tours, they signed with Xenith, I said, or at least you paid them, we have records of that.

  His face was chubbier than you’d think, or rather more square, his eyebrows graying into invisibility.

  We extend our deepest sympathies to their families and to these brave mens’ comrades, and we thank them wholeheartedly for their service to our nation. Other than that, I have no comment.

  You said all that already, verbatim, I said.

  And yet I must repeat myself, he said. He swiped bread through the last splatter of sauce on his plate.

  Authorities are actively investigating whether all five victims may have been targeted because of their connections to Xenith. Your company will be implicated in a homicide investigation. And I don’t mean in Iraq, where you can just cut and run, I mean government contracts under scrutiny, I mean murder trials, court appearances, front-page spotlight. Do you deny that your company had relationships with all five victims, not just the two officially on record?

  What do you say to those who would call this company a shadow army?

  To put it another way: to whose army would you say your employees belong?

  He was walking away, I was speaking to the carafe. Several large men had arrived to block any pursuit.

  I’ll have lunch, I said to the waiter behind them, reaching for LeRoy’s bread basket—A menu, please.

  I ordered carpaccio, which disgusted me. No one in the restaurant had a thing to say. When I left, head touched by afternoon wine, there in the shade of the restaurant’s awning I discovered: Modigliani. I wasn’t even surprised.

  I take it that didn’t go well, he said.

  I said: It was just lunch.

  Thomas

  Penny, I said. I stood in the doorway of her room.

  Now, she’s never dangerous, the case manager had said when she left me at the nurse’s station. But she won’t talk to you, the floor nurse had added, leading me down the hall.

  I understand, I said, my research does not require an interview.

  To reassure her I elaborated: My methodology requires me simply to be in Mrs. Malachy’s presence. Thus I’ll experience a simulacrum of her husband’s working environs, insofar as is possible.

  Well, the nurse said, she’s not easily riled, but all the same, don’t try.

  How old is she now, by the way? I asked.

  Shouldn’t you know that? the nurse replied.

  Penny’s hair was graying, or gray. Framed in the window were the silos I’d parked by, snow blowing so high against them that they appeared to be shrinking. In the sunset they had an orange gleam, and Penny sat with one hand on the sill, her hair fanned over the chair back as if arranged to catch the light.

  Penny turned and nodded at me, as though in recognition.

  I smiled, set up the folding chair, took out my notepad.

  I began:

  He believed in two varieties of love, one ideal and one earthly.

  I struck this out, the tip of my pencil breaking, Penny still facing the window. She had gathered herself up on the chair, hand on a thin ankle, on her wrist a silver bracelet, cheap-looking and, I imagined, a gift from the nurses.

  I tried again: It is unjust to claim he did not love her. He had determined that ideal love was sacred and not to be known in this world.

  I wrote: Whether she knew of his theories and her place in them, we do not know.

  No: How she loved him, we do not know.

  In his twenties and early thirties, the period before he met Penny, Malachy’s work exhibited his characteristic wit, bursts of lyricism within a minimal dramatic structure, compelling enough to gather the city’s leading actors to his theater. Including Catherine Donnelly, his great love (as he called her in his daybooks of the time and even, though rarely, decades later), by this time known solely by her stage name, Sybil. According to Gideon—whose account has been, I will argue, too widely accepted—Malachy’s poetry and plays had taken on “the mighty task of recreating a truly national mythos, out of primitive folktales a body of myth to sustain a nation-state.” Yet could this not also be called a labor of resolute nostalgia? Children’s skip-rope songs and mothers’ hearth stories so ennobled? As though to tease out even the most prominent colonial families, that they might sample this morsel, this quaint native display? The dialogue was saturated with phrases in the long-suppressed native tongue, which no one would have understood—only the most dedicated young republicans might have advanced so far in their studies; or a few old aunts in the country could have nodded toothlessly. But they would have known this performance for what it was: the language not for its own sake but to goad the colonials. Sybil headed off into the villages in the west country to perfect her accent, on the same trip and not inciden
tally joining a tenant farmers’ protest, which drew the newspapers out for one of her notorious speeches.

  Much more should be said of these performances, the notices that appeared in the papers of the time, but: Penny. Penny’s back to me, her vertebrae discernible through her dressing gown. Her frame slight as in the decades of photographs, her breasts still full, at this angle I saw the curve in her shoulders born of a life bearing their weight. I imagine as a girl she’d have colluded happily with her dressmaker on necklines. Penny was from a middle-class family unlikely to attend the theater, her father an upper-level clerk in one of the shipping companies. She had come to the performance on her own, arm-in-arm with her friend Winifred, who was a niece of one of the oldest republican families, its rebellious roots extending back two hundred years (though Winifred herself made no mark on history, marrying a railroad man and emigrating in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil, dying in her third childbirth). Penny. Of course I did not know if she came arm-in-arm. At the window Penny was humming, an orange stratum of clouds descending. When I asked about the humming, the duty nurse said: Yes, she hums. I had wanted to ask what, but clearly it was tuneless. Or not tuneless—tuneless was the obvious word, and I wouldn’t use it, what would that even mean, tuneless hum? The melody proceeded by some system; it was I who could not comprehend it. Penny had been musical as girls of her class were, able to play piano a little and sing. If she had displayed any distinctive musical ability, it had never been mentioned. Perhaps this was only because Sybil’s gifts had been so extraordinary—and weren’t the two drawn up for comparison in every aspect, down even to their dogs? Sybil’s a purebred of exceptional devotion and independence; Penny’s a scrap of a thing, famed in her husband’s daybooks only for keeping them in dispute with a neighbor, whose chickens the dog habitually killed. But at seventeen Penny had come to the theater, and, since she had not been familiar with theater, a naïf, and the play was of historical import, an unequivocal achievement, would she not have smiled? “Her smile is one of the great constancies of my life,” her husband wrote once in his daybook—no, in a letter to his editor. But was that, truly, praise?