All That's Left to Tell(31)

“How long do you think it’ll be safe to stay here?” he asked.

“It’s never been what I’d call safe,” she said. “It’s probably less so now. By now you know it’s almost impossible to predict what might happen on any given day. What I’ve learned—”

She stopped there.

“What you’ve learned?” he pressed. She shifted in her chair, perhaps uncrossing and recrossing her legs. He realized he now was attempting to imagine her legs.

“I’m not going to tell you it’s thrilling to live with a knife at your throat. I don’t live that way, or at least I wouldn’t describe it like that. But in our little crucible, on some days, when something unexpected happens, you could say so much is revealed about others so fast. Sometimes it’s something about someone’s mother or someone’s home. Sometimes it’s about fear or something else that’s primitive.”

“Like petroglyphs?”

For a second, he imagined he could hear her smile.

“Older than those,” she said. “Living this way—as someone who didn’t grow up here, who had someone else’s money, and who is fighting for a cause. It’s exciting for a long time. Even after the worst of everything it’s exciting. But you get tired of others’ blood…”

Again he thought of Azhar. “Blood on your hands, Josephine?”

“Don’t ask me that question. It’s not a relevant question today, and you know it. But I don’t mean literally. I’m talking about something else. Like the other day, when we were driving away. Your heart was pounding, wasn’t it? You might have thought you were about to die, and it’s possible right then that you were. I thought I could hear your heart in your ears. And as Saabir was driving I could see the artery in his neck throbbing with tension. That’s the kind of blood I mean. The blood that seems indifferent to anything other than escape, or flight, or some unwanted embrace that pushes it toward another generation.”

“All right, Josephine. I get it.”

“You think I’m overstating it?”

“Not really.”

“You have no idea what I’ve lived through here.”

For the first time she sounded almost angry.

“You could tell me.”

At this, she stayed silent for a while. He had spoken with more tenderness than he’d intended.

“Is that why you gave me the little house on the lake? Those quiet years? The summer rowing across the pond?”

“That was Genevieve.”

“Genevieve. Josephine. Any difference?”

“It’s important you don’t confuse the two.”

She had told him the story of Claire and Genevieve’s journey across Nevada while he sat at the base of the cliff with his back to her, and as her shadow, shrinking as the sun rose, moved a few steps one direction, and then another as she spoke, and Saabir burned through cigarette after cigarette, the smoke and the smell of the sparse trees on the rocky outcroppings heavier in the warming early afternoon. Sentence by sentence he was pulled in, not into the life of the Claire he knew, but the Claire he could barely have recognized. And had Josephine not stepped out of the car somewhere on the way back to the city, had he not been taken to a different house and had an additional glimpse of his own vulnerability, he would have asked her to stay to tell him more of that story.

“I’m not sure why that’s important. Are you saying Genevieve’s not like you?”

She laughed briefly, but chose not to answer him directly.

“I don’t want you to think I’m being held here like you, against my will, though as I’ve already told you, I’m not free to travel,” she said. “But I’ve spent years here, as a woman, in a place where the rules and roles for women are well defined and Americans are not exactly embraced.”

“So you are American?”

“You know, I’m tired of the tone of these questions. You have no power here, and you know it. But if there’s something specific you want to know about me, then ask. Yes, I’m American. And no, living here isn’t exactly The Sheltering Sky, if you’ve read it. But there are times it’s reminiscent.”

“Honestly, I wasn’t aware of my tone. And I haven’t read it, of course.”

“I think you’re still carrying on as if the strangeness of this place is outside you, and you might endure it, and someday go home. It’s a different thing once the strangeness is inside you. I bet Claire understood that at the moment she was killed. But when she doesn’t die, like in our story, I don’t know what she understands. We’ll see, won’t we?” She seemed to think about this for a moment. “And would I like for my own life a house on a lake where daily I could row across a pond and watch the little whirlpools spin away under the oars? Yes. Of course yes. At some point, everyone wants to have that for as long as they can hang on to it.”

“It doesn’t seem like many get that here. I wouldn’t know, but life seems a hell of a lot less innocent than it does at home.”

“This is my home now. And I think the man rowing across the lake in our story, he’s not looking for a return to innocence. He’s looking for something, but not that.”

“Josephine,” he said, lowering his voice as it dawned on him. “After your lover was killed. Did someone—what happened to you?”