A Time of Miracles Read online

  She explains that the roof of corrugated iron must have a pitch, otherwise the snow will accumulate on top and the whole thing will collapse.

  Finally, she shows me a spot behind one of the walls, where I’m supposed to dig a hole.

  “What’s it for?” I ask.

  “Well, it will be to do our business!” she answers with a wink.

  “Oh, OK.”

  It gives me a funny feeling to dig our toilet. In the Complex we shared toilets with the other people on the floor, but here we’ll have our own private corner. Gloria says that we’re becoming bourgeois. I don’t understand that word, but she laughs so hard that I laugh with her, right by the edge of our future poop hole.

  Stambek is nearly fifteen. He’s two heads taller than me and his shoulders are as wide as a man’s. He reminds me of Abdelmalik, but he’s white instead of black. He and I get along: I talk, he listens.

  Mr. Betov often knocks on his son’s head. Afterward he says, “Quiet!” and adds, “Listen how it echoes in there!”

  I prick up my ears and Stambek does too, his eyes closed, but we don’t hear anything.

  Mr. Betov sighs. “It doesn’t matter. What’s important is to have both arms,” he says, grumbling.

  Stambek smiles and rolls up his sleeves. His arms are muscular and hairy, and he’s got veins that remind me of the rivers in my atlas. He motions for me to pull up my sleeves. I make a face. My arms are like twigs.

  But Mr. Betov is right. At Souma-Soula everybody uses their arms to work, even the children. That’s how it is if you want to eat.

  We’ve barely finished nailing down the roof when Gloria and I head over to the hiring station. This time we won’t be holding out our hands the way we did at Kopeckochka. The hiring supervisor, whom we call Chief, points to a gigantic grayish pile that undulates over kilometers. It’s a sort of bare mountain. On top of it I see clusters of people who are squatting.

  “You dig through the dump,” Chief explains. “I’ll lend you tools, which you’ll bring back to me every evening. If you lose them, or if they’re stolen, you’ll have to pay for them. Is that clear?”

  “What are we looking for?” Gloria asks.

  “This!” Chief answers, taking a small metal cylinder topped with a wire out of his pocket.

  He puts it in our hands so that we can see what it looks like.

  “A lightbulb cap?” Gloria says, surprised.

  “Exactly! But what we’re interested in is the nickel wire. You dig, find the caps, and save the wire. At the end of the day you’ll be paid according to the weight of the nickel you’ve gathered, is that clear?”

  I nod as the list of elements that Mrs. Hanska made us repeat so often comes back to my mind by bits: neon, neptunium, nickel.… I’m really pleased to use my knowledge.

  So Gloria and I climb the mountain with our tools that look like grapnels. Chief assigns us to a spot, which we share with the Betov family. Even the grandmother, with her bad legs, is working.

  “Be careful,” Mr. Betov warns us, “there’s broken glass everywhere. It goes under your skin if you’re not careful.”

  I squat near Stambek. He digs at an incredible pace, sorting the caps and the nickel wires as if he has done this all his life.

  At the end of the day I feel so tired that I don’t even count the coins that Chief gives me. I walk like a robot to our shed and go to sleep without eating, without even a cup of tea, my cheek on my lambskin blanket.

  I dream about Gloria Bohème’s five brothers. I see their faces, all dirty because of the war. I see Fotia’s and Oleg’s bleeding shoulders. Anatoly’s broken eyeglasses. Iefrem’s curly hair, stiffened by mud. And Dobromir, sitting astride a cannon, with his invincible, angelic smile.

  In the middle of the night Gloria’s coughing wakes me up. The dog is barking and scolding in her chest. I can’t bear to hear this awful noise, so I block my ears.

  chapter eleven

  AFTER a few weeks on the glass mountain, I’m an expert in the recovery of nickel. My grapnel digs, my fingers grab the caps, thwack! I pull the wire. I make twice as much money now as I did the first days, and we can afford to buy more food at the small grocery store. I’m proud of myself, but I’m worried about Gloria. She’s coughing more and more; Mr. Betov says that it’s because of the dust.

  “This damn dust gets in your throat, deep down!” he says. “You have to be very careful!”

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Gloria says, panting. “It’s just bronchitis, it’ll pass. Don’t forget that I’m as sturdy as the trees, Koumaïl!”

  At work, when I squat near Stambek, I talk to him about all sorts of things. I tell him about Abdelmalik and Sergei, about Vassili and Zemzem. I explain that I promised Emil I’d bring him back some loukoums. I teach him the different cuts of beef and the mineral hardness scale, but Stambek’s head is like a sieve. He repeats the things I say, but they don’t stick in his brain.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “This way I can tell you the same thing every day and you won’t get bored.”

  Stambek laughs, and we keep digging cheerfully in the sharp depths of the mountain. He’s a good friend. It’s too bad that I’m too tired at night to play with him. The pure and simple truth is that I miss running in the staircase with Baksa, Emil, and the others. But I guess life goes on and you have to grow up.

  One day I witness an accident caused by the drunk driver of a truck. It happens when everybody lines up, right where we unload our bags of nickel to be weighed. The truck starts suddenly with its load, but instead of moving forward, it backs up. People shout, jostling each other … too late. A little girl is crushed under the truck’s wheels.

  The girl’s mother throws herself on the ground and pulls at her daughter’s body. She lets out such a piercing wail that my hair stands on end. The driver gets out of the truck, totally unsteady. He puts his hands over his mouth when he understands what he has done. His eyes pop out. The mother screams, and the crowd looks at the driver. He takes off running like crazy, trying to get as far away as possible from the truck and the dead girl’s body.

  When Chief arrives, he sees the disaster. People help the mother carry her dead daughter to her shed. Silence falls over us, except for the engine of the truck, which keeps running stupidly. Then Chief gets behind the steering wheel and drives the truck to the factory, on the other side of the glass mountain.

  All night I think about what happened, while Gloria coughs her lungs out.

  The next morning when I go see Chief to get my grapnel, I ask him whether the drunk driver came back.

  Chief shakes his head. “If he returns to Souma-Soula, people will kill him,” he says.

  “I know someone who can do his job,” I say. “Someone who doesn’t drink alcohol. Just tea, Chief!”

  “Someone who can drive trucks?” he asks distrustfully.

  “Yes, Chief! She can even repair engines and oil pistons, and isn’t afraid to get her arms deep in grease!”

  From that day on, Gloria abandons her job on the mountain. Behind the wheel of the truck, she jerks along the road full of potholes as she makes her way between the unloading zone and the factory. She’s happy and so am I. When I see her not far from the spot where I sort things with the Betov family, I stand up and wave to her. Stambek does the same, and we shout, “Hello!” Gloria honks three times and flashes her lights. All the pickers of nickel are startled, and Stambek laughs like a madman until his father slaps his head. Then we calm down and go back to work. But the most important thing is that at night Gloria doesn’t cough as much.

  Stambek has four sisters. The youngest one is only six years old, and the oldest is thirteen. In the middle there are the twins, Suki and Maya, the ones I like best. To tell them apart, Mrs. Betov gave me a tip: Suki has a beauty spot close to her mouth, whereas Maya’s is located between her eyebrows, like a period between two sentences. I look at the twins a lot, but I can’t decide which one is prettier. And when one of them happens to talk to me, I mumble and I g
et confused. I become a complete idiot. Exactly like Gloria when Zemzem gave her his flask of water and she couldn’t say a word.

  Even Stambek notices that his sisters make my heart beat faster. Every time my eyes rest on them, he puckers his lips and makes kissing sounds.

  “Stop it!” I tell him. “It’s disgusting!”

  His face drops. “Really? It’s disgusting?”

  “Yes!”

  But, like always, he forgets everything and does it again until my cheeks become warmer than the coal under the samovar.

  At night in our shed Gloria notices me daydream.

  “What makes you sigh like that, Koumaïl?” she asks.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “Just as I thought … you’re in love.”

  I grumble, and Gloria laughs as she makes pancakes.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being in love!” she says. “It’s probably the most beautiful thing in the world. When I walked with Zemzem along the railroad tracks, I was happier than ever before.…”

  She sighs loudly and starts daydreaming too, her gaze lost through the plastic of the window.

  After a while I jump up. “Is something burning?” I cry.

  “God damn it!” Gloria says, retrieving the burned pancakes.

  I make a face. “They’re like coal now!” I say.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk! They’re well done, is all!”

  I sit on the floor, on top of the tarp that we found and use as a rug. We smile at each other as we chew our burned dinner. Sometimes I have the feeling that my heart is directly linked to Gloria’s.

  “Even if I’m in love,” I say, “I’ll always love you, right?”

  “Of course, Monsieur Blaise! And don’t forget your real mother. You must think of her, too!”

  I nod to make her happy.

  But as hard as I try to imagine Jeanne Fortune’s frail figure and pale face, I can’t see my mother as other than tall, with dark hair and red cheeks, and a little on the heavy side.

  chapter twelve

  ONE spring day Stambek and I go to the hiring station, but Chief refuses to give us grapnels. He says that no one is going to work today because it’s a religious holiday.

  “Religion is fine and a day of rest is great, but what are we going to eat tonight?” I grumble.

  Suddenly Stambek decides to bring me to a spot that he discovered when he was taking a walk. When Stambek has an idea, he can’t let go of it! I decide to follow him, and this is how I discover the lake.

  It’s about an hour away on foot from the corrugated-iron area, in a wild spot where the wind whirls. Stambek explains that he found this place when he followed a group of people carrying fishing rods. I see that there are a lot of fishermen along the shores of the lake.

  “Tonight we’ll eat fish!” my friend shouts.

  We don’t have fishing rods, but we’re handy, and given the diverse rubbish that’s around us, we’re not short of supplies. An old radio antenna, a plastic thread, a rusty nail—and we’re ready.

  We make our way over the soft bank, our shoes sinking in the mud. On the opposite shore I see partially collapsed concrete buildings. According to Stambek, that’s all that is left of the lightbulb factory. I try to imagine a time when the thousands of lightbulbs were new, unbroken, their nickel wires incandescent, but it’s a waste of time. That era is gone, just like Vassili’s orchard, just like my life as a baby in my mother’s arms, or like the peace in the Caucasus.

  I look for worms in the mud, and Stambek hooks them on the nail. We look at them as they squirm and we cast our fishing line. Then we wait in silence, motionless, for fish to bite.

  Fishing is a little like holding out your hand at Kopeckochka: it takes a long time to get anything, and even then it’s often disappointing. If the wind weren’t so strong, I’d fall asleep.

  After a while, though, the line moves and suddenly tightens. We jump up. Stambek begins pulling with all his strength.

  “A big one! A big one!” he shouts as a silvery back and fin float up. “Hurry, Koumaïl!”

  I rush to help. I lean over to catch the line, when suddenly I slide on the slippery bank and fall into the ice-cold lake. I sink! I choke on a mouthful of water! Helpmehelpme!

  Stambek lets go of everything and pulls me out. I’m shaking all over, my lips are blue, and my ears are sore. The big fish is gone, together with the radio antenna, the line, and the nail.

  I’m the only thing that Stambeck has caught.

  I cough up putrid water from my lungs, then I throw up, and Stambek takes me back home straightaway.

  Back in the shed my teeth are chattering so much that Gloria says she thinks she hears Spanish castanets. She swears as she undresses me. My clothes are so stiff with cold that they’re like cardboard.

  “God damn it, Koumaïl!” she groans. “What a strange idea to go swimming in this kind of weather.”

  She rubs me hard enough to skin me, but I keep shivering and I can’t say a word. My thoughts are frozen in my head.

  Stambek and Mr. Betov come back, their arms loaded with blankets. They take me to the corner of the room where Gloria has set up a stove, and they cover me with several layers and start a fire. Stambek mumbles some excuses as his father slaps his head.

  “There’s nothing in there!” he keeps repeating. “Nothing but wind!”

  I fall into such a deep sleep that it feels as if I’m sinking to the center of the earth.

  chapter thirteen

  I’M sick. I can’t get up. I can’t do anything.

  Gloria can’t stop working, otherwise we won’t have any money. So Mr. Betov asks his daughters Suki and Maya to take turns watching me while Gloria drives the truck.

  “We are a large family and yours is small,” Mr. Betov says. “I can lend my daughters for a few days!”

  My illness lasts exactly six days.

  The twins stay by my bedside. They burn fragrant herbs; they dab my feverish forehead with a wet cloth and put their cool hands under my neck to help me sit up. They make me drink tea. Liters of it! With honey and extracts.

  I try to remember the names of the medicinal plants old Lin taught us at the university for the poor. In the fog of my fever, I recite: “Suma powder, excellent tonic … Eucalyptus globulus to treat sinus infections … cinnamon oil to soothe a cough and fever … camphor for massages …”

  Suki takes my pulse. Her fingers are as light and delicate as a bird’s legs. I tell her silly things, and when she laughs, I see her beauty spot disappear in a dimple.

  Maya sings. Her voice lulls me and I go to sleep without coughing, submerged by a flow of sweetness. When I wake up, I feel her face near me, with the beauty spot that punctuates the sentence of her eyebrows. I ask her what is written there.

  She squints a little and answers.

  “Suki is right! You just say any foolish thing, Koumaïl!”

  Unlike Stambek, Maya and Suki don’t have wind in their heads. They tell me what their life was like before the war, when they lived in a large brick house, far from Souma-Soula. One day a bomb fell and their house collapsed. Stambek stayed for three days and nights under the debris, and everybody thought he was dead.

  “But when the rescuers got him out, he was whole!” Maya smiles. “It took us a while to notice that his mind had stayed in the rubble.”

  Suki sighs. “Maybe one day we’ll find it again,” she says. “The war has taken many things from many people.”

  I shiver under my blankets. “But if your house hadn’t collapsed,” I say, “if the train hadn’t derailed, if the militia hadn’t taken Vassili’s orchard, and if they hadn’t chased us to the other side of the Psezkaya River, I wouldn’t have fallen in the lake.”

  “So?” Suki inquires, perplexed.

  I turn red and shut my eyes. War is bad, that much is true. And it’s true that it has taken many things from many people. But it has also given me Gloria and my first taste of love. How can you explain something so strange? I wonder
.

  When Gloria comes back from work, her face so coated in road dust that she looks like a relative of Abdelmalik, I ask her if one has the right to be happy in wartime. She looks at me gravely and wipes her dirty cheeks before answering.

  “To be happy is recommended at all times, Monsieur Blaise!” she says.

  chapter fourteen

  UNFORTUNATELY, the best of times have to come to an end. I have no choice but to get better and go back to work on the mountain. From now on I am forbidden to accompany Stambek on his walks, and he’s not allowed to go to the lake anymore. But Suki and Maya still visit us in the evening.

  We are less tired now that we’re used to working hard. We sit on the tarp and play with cards that I made out of cardboard. I teach them the rules of poker, bridge, and blackjack the way Kouzma taught us, which means cheating. Suki has lots of fun, and Maya gets irritated because she doesn’t like to lose. When we need a fourth player, we call Stambek.

  “It’s very simple,” I say. “You have five cards. When two of them have the same numerical rank, you’ve got a pair. If you have three of the same numerical rank, it’s even better. If all your cards are of the same color, it’s a flush.”

  Stambek concentrates so hard that he breaks into a sweat. It’s sad to see him like this, with his brain full of holes! I promise myself that one day I’ll take my grapnel and, instead of looking for nickel wires, I’ll dig in the ruins to recover Stambek’s intelligence.

  “Well, I’m sleepy,” Maya says suddenly.

  “Yes, I’m exhausted,” Suki adds.

  We put the cards aside, and Stambek is relieved to be going back home. Before they leave, the twins kiss me on the cheek. My heart lights on fire faster than dry straw. But as soon as they’re gone, the fire dies down and a feeling of emptiness fills my stomach. Love makes me feel hot and cold; the pure and simple truth is that I’m not sure I can survive it.