A Time of Miracles Read online

  “Puliba?” I say.

  Gloria winks at me. “Come on.”

  We go through the front door and enter an echoing hall. Several women with children are in line in front of a counter managed by a heavy lady with tired eyes. We give her a few coins before taking a flight of stairs that goes underground.

  “I knew we would be lucky,” Gloria tells me. “The water has not been cut off yet.”

  Once we’re downstairs, warm steam and the scent of perfumed soap suffocate me. Finally I understand that, including the missing letters, “puliba” means “Public Baths.”

  Gloria removes her shoes and then all her clothes. I’m startled by how plump she is. I stand on the tiled floor, frozen like a statue.

  “Come on, Koumaïl, don’t be a baby!” Gloria laughs. “You’ve faced more difficult situations before!”

  I think about what I’ve lived through since the Terrible Accident, and I know she’s right. A moment later, as bare as worms, we disappear into the deliciously warm cloud of the hammam.

  * * *

  I let go of my tiredness, my fear, even some of my sadness, and let them run down the drain with the water of the showers; I feel much lighter. When we come out, we’re as red as newborn babies.

  Gloria’s cheeks probably look as appetizing and shiny as the apples in Vassili’s orchard. She combs my hair, buttons my shirt, and looks at me with satisfaction.

  “You’re as clean as a new coin!” she says. “I’m sure that you’ll please Mr. Ha.”

  I’ve never heard of Mr. Ha. “Is this another surprise?” I want to know. “And why do I need to please him?”

  “Stop asking questions and follow me,” Gloria says. “We have something very important to take care of before curfew.”

  I hang on to her hand, and we make our way along the streets in the opposite direction.

  Mr. Ha is a Chinese man. He’s waiting for us at the back of a hash house, where other Chinese people are eating spicy soup in silence. My mouth starts to salivate, but we haven’t come here to fill our stomachs.

  Mr. Ha takes us to a room barely larger than a cupboard and closed off by a curtain. Gloria takes a wad of dollars out of her pocket, along with our passports.

  Mr. Ha looks at them. He smiles.

  “Ah, yes, France!” he says. “What a beautiful country!”

  He pockets the dollars and then directs me to a stool. I wince. Is he going to shave my hair like creepy Sergei? I wonder.

  “Come on,” Gloria encourages me. “You have nothing to fear.”

  I sit down cautiously. Mr. Ha rummages behind the curtain and then brings out a gleaming camera that stands on a tripod. He positions it in front of me. I turn toward Gloria. I get it! I’m getting a new picture for my passport! That’s why we went to the puliba first! A French kid can’t be dirty.

  “Look this way,” Mr. Ha orders me. “That’s good. Now keep your eyes on the lens and think about the Eiffel Tower.”

  I frown. “What eiffeltower?” I say.

  “Come on, young man, everyone knows the Eiffel Tower!”

  I shake my head. All I know are the pages in my atlas with the names of towns, rivers, mountains—I can even tell you the distance in kilometers between Paris and Marseille—but I have never seen a tower with the name Eiffel.

  Mr. Ha sighs and heads behind his curtain. He comes back with a sort of catalog. There’s a picture on each page—a picture that represents one of France’s monuments.

  “There!” he says, showing me. “That’s the Eiffel Tower. Take a good look.”

  I stare at the image of a big iron edifice in the shape of an arrow planted in the blue sky. The caption, in Russian, says, “The Eiffel Tower, the Champ de Mars, the Seine, the Iéna Bridge, the riverboats.”

  “So, young man? Are you ready?”

  I look up at the lens. I think very hard about this pointed tower, the bridge arched over the Seine, and I imagine that I’m on it. Click!

  “Perfect! A true little Parisian!” Mr. Ha laughs. “All right, now. Off you go!”

  As Gloria sits on the stool to be photographed, I flip through the catalog. That’s how I discover Montmartre and its artists, the crowded Champs-Elysées, the Palace of Versailles, Chartres Cathedral, the Bridge of the Gard, and also Mont-Saint-Michel, which is surrounded by the sea.

  Mr. Ha leans over my shoulder. He looks with me at the sea, the sand, and the golden angel at the top of the mount.

  “You can have the booklet, if you want it,” he tells me. “Learn everything, my boy, you’ll need it.”

  He suggests that we come back in two days, and we leave the hash house followed by the stares of the soup eaters.

  Outside it’s almost twilight. It will be curfew soon; it’s time to go back to our refuge. With Mr. Ha’s catalog under my arm, I ask Gloria what we’ll do when we have our passports.

  “We’ll be able to go wherever we want,” Gloria answers. “Jeanne and Blaise Fortune will be free citizens.”

  I think about this, puzzled. Although I know that my real name is Blaise, I feel sad at the idea of abandoning Koumaïl. The day we board the boat, I know a part of me will stay in Sukhumi like a piece of luggage abandoned on the dock. A suitcase filled with memories and regrets.

  Suddenly I have an idea, and I pull on Gloria’s sleeve.

  “If you become Jeanne, I’ll have to call you Mother for real,” I say.

  Gloria looks at me so seriously that it cuts my breath short.

  “Do you think you can do that?” she wants to know.

  I think about it; then I nod and repeat what she told me the day we were sitting at the entryway of Kopeckochka.

  “There’s nothing wrong with making up stories to make life more bearable,” I tell her.

  chapter nineteen

  THE night bombings intensify. Everyone says that the harbor is destroyed, and Mr. Ha sighs loudly when he hands us our passports. They look good, but he tells us that it’s impossible to board any boat now. Too dangerous! We have to wait!

  “Be patient,” Gloria says when she notices my disappointment. “These are the hazards of life. We have to take them in stride.”

  So we stay cooped up in the attic of the Matachine, watching the planes through the dormer window and hoping for a truce.

  I’m not bored because I have my catalog of France to study. I pester Gloria with facts about the Romans, Vercingetorix, and Charlemagne. The catalog is in Russian, of course, except for the last pages, where there is some everyday French vocabulary in phonetics.

  “Repeat after me,” I say. “Mercijevouzenpri.” Thankyouverymuch.

  “Mercijevouzenpri.”

  “Not bad. Uncafésilvouplé.” Acoffeeplease.

  “Uncafésilvouplé.”

  “Good. Pardonmeussieujevoudrèalléalatouréfel.” Pardonsiridliketogototheeiffeltower.

  “Pardonmeussieuje … You’re tiring me out, Koumaïl. It’s too difficult!”

  “OK, I’ll learn by myself. But don’t complain if you get lost in the streets of Montmartre.”

  Gloria often goes down to the bar to talk with the man who opens the beer bottles. I’m not allowed to go with her because it’s none of my business. When she comes back up, she brings food with her. Then she presses her ear against Fotia’s radio and stays like that for hours, totally absorbed. She says she listens to the war news, but I think that all she hears are crackling sounds.

  Then one evening the trapdoor opens and two heads appear above the floor.

  “This is Nour and Fatima,” says the man who opens the beer bottles. “Squeeze up a bit, there’s no other way in.”

  He unfolds two other camping beds, and Gloria puts coal in the samovar while I stare at Fatima.

  She sits on the bed and undoes the scarf that covers her hair. I have never seen anyone so beautiful. For the second time in my life, I fall in love. That, too, I can’t help. These are the hazards of life, right?

  Fatima is seventeen. She doesn’t look like Suki or Maya.
Fatima is unique.

  Her face is golden, her lips are very thin, and her voice fills me with sadness when she sings—which she does a lot of! She talks to me about her old life, when she went to the school in her town. Her favorite subjects were math and geometry. With her hands she draws figures—cones, triangles, diamonds.… It looks like a dance. I tell her about what I learned in our university for the poor, and Fatima praises me.

  “You know so many things for your age, Koumaïl!” she says. “I’m sure that you’ll become someone very important!”

  I turn red, but Fatima can’t see me because she keeps her eyes closed. She’s been like this since the militia killed her father somewhere to the east of the Caucasus.

  Nour, her mother, tells us what happened:

  “They came into our house with Kalashnikovs. They shot my husband. Fatima saw him fall on his prayer rug. Ever since, she refuses to open her eyes.”

  Nour cries a lot, and Gloria pulls her to her bosom. She whispers words meant for adults—words about ethnic minorities, genocide, international tribunal—but it’s obvious that Nour has caught a despair.

  Seated on my bed, I wonder what color Fatima’s eyes are. I’d also like to know what she sees behind the curtain of her eyelids. Is it the clear rectangle of light coming through the dormer window? I wonder. Images of her past? Her father’s blood? Just darkness? I don’t dare ask her any questions. We all live with our ghosts, and I know you can’t disturb them too much, otherwise the sorrow that lies in our chests will wake up. It’s better to concentrate on the present, on our refuge, with the boiling tea of the samovar and the desire to move toward other horizons.

  “What are you reading?” Fatima asks me.

  “How do you know I’m reading?”

  “I hear the rustle of pages, silly. My ears aren’t clogged.”

  I tell her about Mr. Ha and the catalog. I describe the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Mediterranean coast, which looks just like Sukhumi before the war. Fatima smiles.

  “You’re lucky to be going there,” she says. “My mother and I are going to Saudi Arabia.”

  I consult my atlas. Saudi Arabia appears on page 80, south of the Caucasus. According to my map, it’s an immense desert of sand. I tell Fatima she should come with us instead, but she shakes her head. It’s simpler for her to go to Saudi Arabia because she has an aunt who works there, and because of the Muslim religion.

  “France is not a Muslim country,” she explains to me. “It’s a Christian country.”

  I am so disappointed about this religion issue that I go find Gloria.

  “Is France a Christian country?” I ask her.

  “France doesn’t have a religion, Koumaïl.”

  “Oh? But are there Muslims in France?”

  She says yes, there are some. In France you can believe whatever you want, say whatever you want, and do whatever you want because it is a country that believes in human rights.

  “So if Fatima comes to France, will she be able to pray to Allah on her rug?” I want to know. “Will anybody bother her if she hides her hair under a scarf? Will anybody shoot at her with a Kalashnikov?”

  “France stands for liberty, equality, fraternity,” Gloria says with assurance. “No one there is going to pass judgment on his or her neighbors because of a rug or because of their hair. It’s not worth it, OK?”

  “OK!”

  I hurry to repeat this to Fatima. I want to convince her to come with us. But she stubbornly shakes her head.

  “We must each follow our destiny,” she says. “And, Allah willing, may peace come back to the Caucasus so that everyone can return home. Maybe then we’ll see each other again, Koumaïl.”

  “But that might take a long time,” I say, getting upset. “And what if it never happens? Why do we have to wait for Allah’s will?”

  Two small tears slide from under Fatima’s closed eyelids. There is no answer to such a question.

  I touch her hand and we lie down on our camping beds, side by side, as timid stars shine through the dormer window.

  “If Allah is willing, you’ll open your eyes,” I say, dreaming out loud. “Peace will be here. You’ll see people walk barefoot under Sukhumi’s palm trees. And I’ll be grown up and as strong and as muscular as Stambek. And then I’ll ask you to marry me. And I’ll take you wherever you want to go, to Vassili’s orchard or to Mont-Saint-Michel. And everybody will be there—Zemzem and Gloria, her five brothers, Emil and Baksa … everybody.”

  I say all the things that go through my head—all stupid kid things. But Fatima doesn’t make fun of me. She holds my hand tightly in hers and she sings. She knows better than to shatter my dreams; I’ll just lose another piece of my heart. Then only crumbs of it will be left.

  chapter twenty

  AMONG the precious things in our gear, the one Fatima likes best is Oleg’s violin. I put it on her knees with the bow. She runs her fingers along the curves of the body, the scroll, and then plucks the strings.

  “Hmmm. Funny sound!” she says.

  “The strings were gone, so I repaired it myself with wires I found in a dump,” I tell her.

  Fatima takes the bow, secures the instrument under her chin, and starts playing. At first the tune is timid, but soon the notes get louder, until they soar, and answer each other. It’s a miracle that leaves me speechless.

  When she finishes, her face is radiant. “It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s beautiful anyway,” she says. “My father taught me music. Do you want to try?”

  She hands me the violin and sits next to me. Gropingly she guides my hands. Her hair grazes me. I feel her breath on the nape of my neck.

  “Are you scared?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “So why are you shaking, silly?”

  I try to contain my violent heartbeats. I concentrate, but Oleg’s violin resists, and Fatima laughs as she listens to my awful squeak-squeak. Never mind! I would take all the music lessons in the world to feel Fatima’s breath on my skin.… “Show me again! Teach me! Help me!” I tell her.

  The only problem is that I’m grating on everybody’s ears and nerves. After a while Gloria begs me to stop.

  “You don’t like music, is that it?” I say, vexed.

  “Of course I do, Koumaïl. That’s precisely the point!”

  Laughing, Fatima puts the violin back in its box. She promises that we’ll try again when Nour and Gloria go down to settle their business at the bar, something that happens at least once a day.

  In fact, it’s the time I like best—being alone with Fatima. I read my catalog to her with the everyday French expressions, like “Oupuijetrouvéunbonrestaurant?” Wherecanifindagoodrestaurant? Or “Jesuimaladéjevoudrèvoirunmédecin.” Imsickandineedadoctor. Fatima repeats them, twisting her mouth in all directions. We also have a game: listening to the street noises. Fatima tells me what she hears, and I lean through the open dormer window to tell her what I see—a bicycle braking, two men insulting each other, a car accident, cats fighting.… She can guess a lot of things, and I think that her sense of hearing is as good as Zemzem’s.

  “Do you know what Zemzem means in Arabic?” she asks me. “It means ‘murmur of water.’ ”

  “Really?”

  “And do you know what your name means, Koumaïl?”

  “No.”

  “It means ‘universal.’ ”

  I don’t want to confess that Koumaïl is not my real name. That I’m really a French boy lost in the Caucasus.

  Nour and Gloria finally come back up to the attic with corn pancakes, rice, and even meatballs with onions. We divide the feast into four equal parts, seated on the floor around the samovar.

  Everything is fine up until the day when Fatima and I hear shouts in the Matachine, then a loud noise coming from the street. Fatima becomes pale.

  “I can hear the growl of hatred and anger,” she whispers. “Something is happening!”

  The next second Nour and Gloria pop through the trapdoor, out of
breath and with somber eyes.

  “The rebels!” Nour says.

  “We can’t stay here!” Gloria adds.

  I feel a great emptiness in my chest, as if it’s been punctured, and right then Fatima kneels in front of me.

  “Allah has decided,” she tells me. “Promise me to grow up a lot when you’re in France, Koumaïl. Come, stand up!”

  In spite of the terrible, heavy weight that is suddenly crushing me, I obey. Fatima draws me toward her and puts a hand over my head.

  “Look how high you come up, Koumaïl. Right to my shoulder!” she says.

  I step back to get a better view of the centimeters that separate us.

  “If you want to marry me, you’ll have to come up to here at least!” she goes on, her hand suspended in the air above her own head. The challenge is immense!

  “How will I ever reach that height?” I moan.

  “You will, Koumaïl. If you take good care of yourself.”

  I look at Gloria, who gathers our blankets, the radio, the kitchen utensils, the catalog, and stuffs them in the gear. Nour is already set to leave; she’s waiting for Fatima near the trapdoor.

  “Hurry up!” she begs. “The uprising will reach us soon!”

  I throw myself at Fatima. She hugs me quickly and then it is all over. We run down the ladder. Downstairs the man who opens the beer bottles is about to lower the iron gate over the bar door.

  “Go quickly! It’s dangerous!” he shouts.

  We are thrown into the street, in the middle of a crowd of fugitives, and the iron gate falls shut behind us. Fatima is dragged away by her mother. As I cling to Gloria, I understand that I am losing Fatima. Just like I lost Emil, Baksa, Rebeka, and the others the night the militia chased us from the Complex. Fear does that. It makes people run in every direction, it sows disorder, and after that you are completely lost.

  “Fatima, open your eyes! Look at me!” I shout after her. “You don’t even know what I look like! You won’t be able to remember me!”

  For an instant Fatima fights the crowd that invades the street. She turns back.