The Refugees(4)

“Don’t knock,” I said when I opened the door. “It’s your home, too.”

He merely stared at me, and we lapsed into an awkward silence. Then he said, “Thank you.” His voice was stronger now, almost as high-pitched as I remembered, and this time he did not look away. He still wore my T-shirt and shorts, but when I showed him the clothes that my mother had bought, he said, “I don’t need those.”

“You’re wearing what I gave you.”

His silence went on for so long I thought he might not have heard me.

“We wear them for the living,” he said at last. “Not for us.”

I led him to the couch. “You mean ghosts?”

He sat down next to me, considering my question before answering.

“We always knew ghosts existed,” he said.

“I had my doubts.” I held his hand. “Why have you come back?”

His gaze was discomforting. He had not blinked once.

“I haven’t come back,” he said. “I’ve come here.”

“You haven’t left this world yet?”

He nodded.

“Why not?”

Again he was silent. Finally he said, “Why do you think?”

I looked away. “I’ve tried to forget.”

“But you haven’t.”

“I can’t.”

I had not forgotten our nameless blue boat and it had not forgotten me, the red eyes painted on either side of its prow having never ceased to stare me down. After four uneventful days on a calm sea under blue skies and clear nights, islands at last came into view, black stitching on the faraway horizon. It was then that another ship appeared in the distance, aiming for us. It was swift and we were slow, burdened with more than a hundred people in a fishing boat meant to hold only a fishing boat’s crew and a fishing boat’s load of cold mackerel. My brother took me into the cramped engine room with its wheezing motor and used his pocketknife to slash my long hair into the short, jagged boy’s cut I still wore. “Don’t speak,” he said. He was fifteen and I was thirteen. “You still sound like a girl. Now take off your shirt.”

I always did as he told me, in this case shyly, even though he hardly glanced at me as he ripped my shirt into strips. He bound my barely noticeable breasts with the fabric, then took off his own shirt and buttoned me into it, leaving himself with just his ragged T-shirt. Then he smeared engine oil on my face and we huddled in the dark until the pirates came for us. These fishermen resembled our fathers and brothers, sinewy and brown, except that they wielded machetes and machine guns. We turned over our gold, watches, earrings, wedding bands, and jade. Then they seized the teenage girls and young women, a dozen of them, shooting a father and a husband who had protested. Everyone fell silent except those being dragged away, screaming and crying. I didn’t know any of them, girls from other villages, and this made it easier for me to pray I would not be one of them as I pressed against my brother’s arm. Only when the last of the girls had been thrown onto the deck of the pirate ship, the pirates climbing back on board after them, did I breathe again.

The last man to leave glanced at me in passing. He was my father’s age, his nose a sunburned pig’s foot, his odor a mix of sweat and the viscera of fish. This little man, who spoke some of our language, stepped close and lifted my chin. “You’re a handsome boy,” he said. After my brother stabbed him with his pocketknife, the three of us stood there in astonishment, our gaze on the blade, tipped by blood, a silent moment broken when the little man howled in pain, drew back his machine gun, and swung its stock hard against my brother’s head. The crack—I could hear it still. He fell with the force of dead weight, blood streaming from his brow, jaw and temple hitting the wooden deck with an awful thud still resonant in my memory.

I touched the bruise. “Does it hurt?”

“Not any more. Does it still hurt for you?”

Once more I pretended to think about a question whose answer I already knew. “Yes,” I said at last. When the little man threw me to the deck, the fall bruised the back of my head. When he ripped my shirt off, he drew blood with his sharp fingernails. When I turned my face away and saw my mother and father screaming, my eardrums seemed to have burst, for I could hear nothing. Even when I screamed I could not hear myself, even though I felt my mouth opening and closing. The world was muzzled, the way it would be ever afterward with my mother and father and myself, none of us uttering another sound on this matter. Their silence and my own would cut me again and again. But what pained me the most was not any of these things, nor the weight of the men on me. It was the light shining into my dark eyes as I looked to the sky and saw the smoldering tip of God’s cigarette, poised in the heavens the moment before it was pressed against my skin.

Since then I avoid day and sun. Even he noticed, holding up his forearm against mine to show me I was whiter than he was. We had done the same in the bunker, splaying our hands in front of our faces to see if they were visible in the dark. We wanted to know we were still all there, coated in the dust that sifted onto us after each impact, the memory of the American jets screaming overhead making me tremble. The first time we heard them, he whispered in my ear not to worry. They were only Phantoms.

“Do you know what I liked the most about those times?” He shook his head. We sat on the sofa of my basement office, warmer than the living room in November. “We would come outside after the bombing, you holding my hand while we stood blinking in the sun. What I loved was how after the darkness of hiding there came the light. And after all that thunder, silence.”