Strawberry Fields Page 8

  Alice

  It’s not that Modigliani thinks he’s always welcome, he’s just always there. Haven’t you already interviewed them? I said, meaning our victim Diana’s sister and Diana’s child, who was too young to talk. Her sister had at last agreed to talk to me. Sure, he said, they won’t be happy to see me, the sister has a real mouth on her.

  I nodded, tried to dissuade him, tried to change the appointment, failed. At least he offered to drive, or rather, he assumed that he’d drive. The town Diana’s sister lived in was four hours away, in the undefined territory between the more populated northern and southern parts of the state, west of the mountains, an area I’d never thought about. The town was small but spread out thinly, and she lived down near the dam, close to the trailer parks but further up the state route, in a patch between strip malls where there was a real drive-in, as well as an antiques store, a dentist’s office, and two gas stations across the street from each other, the one on the north side a few cents a gallon cheaper. We pulled into a long dirt driveway. In the yard were one of those elaborate plastic playhouses, a plastic kitchenette set, a three-wheeled wagon lying on its side, and two setups for T-ball. The house had a high concrete foundation and was oddly shaped, roof nearly touching the long grass on one side, on the other a porch, where a man in a hoodie and jeans was sitting and smoking, doing something with his phone. Modigliani laid his hand on my arm, and we were quite close to the man when Modigliani said, Good evening, and the man looked up, or rather down, since we were in fact below him, our faces visible only through the railing.

  Jesus, he said.

  We’re looking for Cerise, Modigliani said.

  Who the fuck are you? the man said.

  Modigliani got out his identification and we introduced ourselves: Is it all right if—? Modigliani gestured toward the porch stairs, and we ascended.

  We had an appointment to speak with Cerise, Modigliani said.

  For tonight? the man put out his cigarette and slid his phone into his pocket.

  At 6, I said.

  He shook his head. She just went out, didn’t say where she was going.

  I confirmed with her yesterday, I said.

  Guess she didn’t want to talk to you, he said, and rose to jerk the sliding door open. A boy, about five, stood on the other side, braid of red licorice in his hand.

  I told you not to leave your sister until the movie was over, the man said.

  I have to pee, the boy said.

  No, you just went, the man said. Go watch your movie.

  Somewhere inside the house a child began crying.

  Jesus, the man said, I told you not to leave your sister.

  She’s not my sister, the child said matter-of-factly, which I understood to mean that the girl must be Diana’s. Lacey, two and a half.

  Lacey! the man called into the house. Just a minute, he said to us, and stepped through the doorway, his hand on the boy’s head as they walked. The boy’s sweatpants were too long and he moved with a sort of shuffling slide. Modigliani and I waited, and the man returned holding a toddler who was screaming into his shoulder.

  Over the noise he said: You guys can wait for Cerise on the porch, if you want, but I don’t think she’s coming back.

  He was holding the girl but not soothing her, and she was wriggling fiercely, her T-shirt bunched up to expose her chest and stomach. The girl’s skin was darker than her mother’s was, and at the moment a small red lump was twisted up in her curls, presumably licorice.

  Her diaper needs to be changed, Modigliani said.

  I looked at the man to apologize, but he was looking past us, into the trees that bordered the yard.

  Anything you want me to tell her? he said.

  We just wanted to talk to her about Diana, I said, before Modigliani could answer.

  The child was now facing us, her screaming full-throated. Do you want me to—I said, reaching out, but fortunately he didn’t hear me.

  She’ll talk to you again when you’ve caught the guy, the man said to Modigliani. She won’t talk to any reporters, he said, now looking at me, and you better not print anything, or what you’ll learn about the Robarge girls is how they lose their fucking tempers. That girl’s got lawyers on speed dial, you don’t want to see it.

  Understood, I said. Modigliani didn’t say anything, just slid the glass door open for the man and child to pass through.

  We walked back to the car, the sky above the trees along the property line pinking.

  We stopped at the more expensive gas station and headed back, a bag of sunflower seeds propped up between us.

  Supposedly Diana went into rehab for drinking last summer, Modigliani said. For a month or so. The daughter’s been living with the sister ever since. The story is, Diana got out of rehab, relapsed, and then eventually went to the VA hospital for another course of treatment, this time focusing on her PTSD. But we can’t find any rehab facility it seems plausible she could have gone to—no record of her anywhere around here, including the place she told her sister she was at, and in any case they’re all out of her price range.

  Hmm, I said, although I already knew this. I already knew some ways to take a month when you needed a month. I asked: Does the family know she never went to rehab?

  Modigliani shrugged. Who knows, he said—which if you think about it was exactly the question.

  She could have used a fake name, he said.

  But he must know that I’d checked every name.

  She came back, though, I said. She must have wanted to come back, see her kid.

  Sort of, he said, I mean, she was still drunk, then she went to live in a hospital.

  Still, I said. She wanted to.

  On the drive back I asked Modigliani: Did I tell you about Jonathan’s dream?

  Modigliani shook his head, facing the rain and the taillights which each sweep of the wiper blades sharpened then softened.

  His girlfriend told me, I said, his ex-girlfriend. She’s with someone new now, a contractor, she said, mostly kitchens, high-end. I talked to her twice, and the second time, when the new boyfriend wasn’t there, she asked me, what did the doctor say about Jonathan’s dream? What dream? I asked. She got angry, she said, I bet he didn’t even tell anyone, I told him he should tell a doctor, maybe someone could help. She was crying through the whole interview, but her makeup never ran, her mascara was beyond belief. She said Jonathan had been having the dream for years, that it used to wake him up, and she’d ask but he wouldn’t say anything about it, until one night he did—although she wasn’t sure then whether to believe him, since they’d been just about to have a big fight when he interrupted in order to tell her his dream start to finish.

  He said: I’m walking along a highway. There are dates in my pockets, I can feel the sticky paper of their skin and am gripping them, I don’t want them to be loose in my pockets. Around me it’s all desert, mice are running over the dunes, I can see them everywhere, constant motion. On the side of the road an old man in a checkered headscarf is digging. There is another shovel, but I don’t help him, I suspect that whoever was last holding that shovel is dead. As he digs he exposes what looks like a small city, a minaret extends bone-white out of the sand, and he keeps digging around it, his head bent very low. A truck stops for me and I get on. The truck is full of Iraqi policemen, and they’re jumping off one by one. At first I think that they’re running around to the front of the truck and climbing up again, but this isn’t what’s happening. One of them is shaking up cans of Coke and replacing them in the crate he’s sitting on. I ask if I can help. I don’t mean with the Coke, but he laughs, and when I look down, I see I am wearing not my uniform but the blue uniform of the Iraqi police, and the outlines of my fingers and the lines of my palms are thickening, like they were drawn in crayon. In the truck they are now speaking a language I don’t speak, not even Arabic, it’s some
gibberish they’ve made up just because they don’t want me to understand. I hear them say Susanne (and this, I tell Modigliani, is the name of Jonathan’s ex-girlfriend, the one who is telling me the dream), and I reach for one of the guns along the side of the truck, but they laugh and push me out the back. I land hard in the middle of a city square. The building walls are covered in graffiti and posters and in the square’s center there’s a fountain, which has no water, and next to it a young man is cooling an overheated car. The man’s face is the same as the face on a poster behind him, which I think means that he’s supposed to be dead. I walk over to him and one of his children runs up to me, sticks out a hand and asks for money. I reach into my pockets, but my pockets are dark with blood, as if dates could bleed. It doesn’t occur to me to wonder about my legs. The man by the hood of the car watches me, then he nods at the child. I believe that the man is going to kill me, and in the window of the car I see my face lost in darkness. I’m worried about whoever is in the car, that they’ll have to see what happens next, and I wake up.

  She told you all that? Modigliani said.

  Yes, I said, I recorded her and I’ve listened many times.

  I don’t think it’s the real dream, though, I said. I think there’s another dream.

  Marie

  At night the door to the study was always closed. The cat would wait outside it and I couldn’t let the cat get in. Mess everything about. There weren’t even piles, really—rather documents and photographs fanned out over the table, as if I were a child learning magic tricks, these my cards. I wish I could say that every morning I had to force myself to enter. That I would scrub the kitchen counters, prepare next week’s lecture, walk to the corner mailbox, anything to delay. No: I rose early, made up a French press and with my elbow opened the door. I knew the location of every item on the table, could reach without looking, and it was now my daily regret that I had not made of the table’s array a facsimile of the actual geography—monks to the west, monastery in the hills; here the village; the road; here the military base. My computer was positioned so that while I wrote I could see not the table but out the window, past the lightning-struck oak to the row of hemlocks, and to my left was my old shelf of reference books, which the internet had made quaint, a scholarly flourish.

  I had thought to begin the next chapter with the monks, but now that too seemed a facile trope: austere withdrawal from the world; the world’s violent reclamation. What profit another retelling of the old story, the defeat of faith, treachery of God? I should confront the fate of the monks with a more radical judgment—who, after all, should think that he may retreat from the world, forswear desire, the world’s very lifeblood, turn his face toward God yet away from His accursed creation? I would begin the chapter in the village with a portrait not of faith or its tribulations, but of pure endurance: two young women had survived the massacre by hiding on a rooftop, one of the only flat roofs in the village, with a knee-high sort of façade wall shielding them from view of the men below. I didn’t know the architectural word for this wall and it was proving irritatingly difficult to discover. And should I use words that would send the reader to the dictionary (and then email; and then the news…)?—accuracy less important than avoiding distraction. In their accounts survivors of such events always talk about how they could hear the screaming, how the screaming haunts them. But rarely does anyone mention what was said; or perhaps this detail is in its tragic mundanity always the first thing trimmed from the interview, the translation. They were crying out to God, one of the girls on the rooftop had said. The girls must have heard pleas, heard the names of children. Some of the men could have been known to their victims. Their victims might have called them by name. Perhaps memory washes out the words, leaves only the sound of screaming, which seems like the brain’s sort of kindness. The men arrived at the monastery bloodied from the slaughter of the village. Another reason not to begin with the monks: they got to live at least this short time longer. And in theory didn’t they lose the least of their lives—a single breath, these days on earth, compared with the eternity to come? Standing over the table I turn over the photographs, which I keep face down, out of an idea of sensitivity. But I can look at them now while eating a sandwich; I can see them on closing my eyes. I’ve been like this for years.

  It took years to find even one man who might that day have been among the killers in the village, who might have been known by someone to belong to the rebel forces who kept at first to the mountains, and then—and then this. An eye expelled from its socket; a boot print in a woman’s head. The photographs were taken more than a day after the massacre, when the first journalists arrived on the scene. Or, properly, the only journalists—an Agence France-Presse reporter and a locally born photographer. Two years later the reporter would be dead, killed by fundamentalist thugs who were purging the capital of foreigners. I had not found the photographer; no one had. The AFP editor would tell me nothing, saying that in those days for the employees’ own protection they used none of the locals’ real names. In the photographs the blood is darkened, but there is not yet any real decay, only in some a massing of insects and the effects of heat and the body’s desiccation. Ant tracks of blood cross this woman’s shin, which in death her dark robe has bunched up to expose, in life it would not have been seen outside the walls of her home. Though I should not say that, truly I know nothing of her, her measure of zealousness or its many opposites. She died on the doorstep, her family within, the cuts on her arms what are called defensive wounds. No real forensic evaluation was done—it is only that through the years many, like me, have studied the photographs and the accounts. Many have been interested in the monks, especially the monks; there had been a monastery on this site for 150 years, each article notes. As though this were an important detail, or anyone couldn’t know that this meant only: since the advent of colonialism. The monks were foreigners, and for this reason if they could have been killed twice, they would have been. They were good to the village, it was said, sharing of their garden’s surplus and supplying medical care, although since they were untrained one wonders what that might have meant. The militia slaughtered the monastery’s sheep as well as its men. The chickens were either killed or escaped; there were none in the photograph of the aftermath. This photograph was shot from a distance: the bodies of the monks and the animal carcasses had been heaped and set alight. But had not burned completely, and the smell must have kept even this courageous photographer at a remove; or perhaps it was simply that none of his shots from close up were good enough to develop. And now the cat is at my ankles, rubbing her cheeks against me with the likeness of affection that is an expression of scent glands. I had gathered the names of everyone in the village, but not the name of the photographer, who might still be alive. I should say, I had 138 names, which I believed to be everyone in the village—although I might not know if someone had escaped; or if one of the young men among the killers was also one of the young men from the village, and thus had survived.

  A generation: boys became men who joined one side or the other. In the name of God butchering foreigners, professors, women who worked outside the home, infidels, anyone, it came to be, throats slit so deep the spine was visible. Or, on the other side, the army and police manning the torture chambers, pulling thousands of so-called suspects and their families out of mosques, off the streets, out of their homes and into the darkness where thousands would then die. It had taken years to find the name I’d been looking for, the name we all knew must exist but could not conjure, many had theorized but I had now found: one man who was both on the payroll of the army and a leader in the rebel forces. He had led the forces into this village, dispatched ten men to the monastery. I had found him. And in this book he would be made known. Forgive me my pride. I won’t use the word payroll; that no one could establish absolutely, but a man who had been arrested, tortured, then released, curiously never to be bothered again, and through the years was seen meeting with
other army informants, even, repeatedly, with two officers, all the while ascending the ranks of the rebels, having manned the infamous checkpoint on the mountain road where at the beginning of the conflict five aid workers had been murdered and then the thirteen soldiers sent for them, the irrevocable act of war. For years I had tracked him. People call what one follows the scent, but I—who have spent so long with these photographs, stench ever absent from them, from the human forms they document—I would not use that word. He was an idea whose incarnation I had discovered, the man I had if not made flesh, brought to light.

  This massacre was his work, by the time of these photographs he was gone from the hills, from the dirt floors on which the dead were laid, but it is as though on looking long enough one sees a spectral evidence. How often have I envisioned you, through the window the hemlocks in frost and thaw. Everyone knew that there had been no shortage of collaborators, on both sides. Anyone anywhere would say that the army had been dirty. But, they always added, always the absolution: it was a dirty fight, against an enemy monstrous beyond imagining, the massacre of the village only one example of its terror and in many ways not the worst. And yet—this village was low in the foothills and the military base was in the valley right below, quite close, would not the sounds have carried? The hours of screaming to which those two women could testify? Tragically, everyone at the base had been out that day, responding to another incident, the base commander had said, and his logs verified. But now, here, I had a name, a man to prove that the army was its own enemy, dirtied the fight itself, while the aid money rolled in, and better than aid money, the guns. I had no image of him and I had to imagine a face, unbearded, suspended in the evening light past my reflection. That country which had stepped through the looking glass: shaven fundamentalists and ski-masked police.