Cities of Refuge (12 page)

T
he restaurant was Peruvian. Because it was good, and near the university, Harold had come here a few times for lunches with his graduate students, who’d always felt compelled to order in
Spanish. All except one, Davey Voith, a kid from some small town in New Brunswick. Out of high school he’d travelled to Mexico with what sounded like a Christian cult, though a socially useful one that built houses for the poor. When he came home, he quit the cult for the study of Mexican history. He was sharp, if a bit too trusting, a professional naïf, and without an ounce of pretension. He’d married young, a nursing student. Now he taught in Miami. Harold saw him every March at the annual conference. Davey always had new photos of his kids stored on his laptop, and called them up in bars or lobbies. Little William and Leena, another year older. Their father was still happy, producing good work, and somehow still himself. Except when he was in Davey’s company, Harold tended to imagine the young man’s life was a brilliantly performed lie.

He’d taken the last empty table in the lattice shade of the patio, and had just ordered wine from a blond waitress whom he recognized when another, a mestizo whom he didn’t, came and asked if he was waiting for a woman named Rosemary. A moment later she was leading him back inside the restaurant and up the stairs to the second floor. It was empty. He was led to a window table. There was no sign of Rosemary Yates. She must have called ahead to reserve the spot. It was she who’d suggested the restaurant. Now that he’d been moved to her table, the place seemed more hers than his.

Father André had called last night with the arrangements and a kind of warning. “We work together, of course, but I don’t always know what she’s up to. I’ve learned not to ask, actually.” He’d described her as “plugged in” to the underground world of illegals. He must have thought this woman could give him some perspective, or counsel him to face his emotions more directly
instead of producing a misleading analysis of the events. The subtext was all wrong.

Harold had wondered why Rosemary hadn’t called him herself. Now it seemed likely that she’d wanted to prepare an entrance, to appear in voice and body all at once. What a lot of calculation had gone into meeting a stranger. She was probably troubled, untrustworthy, of no use to him. Because she was Anglican, he supposed she was dour.

He ate a piece of bread and allowed himself half the glass of Shiraz. By now she was late, and he was hungry, but if he ate more, he’d drink more, and that was out of the question. He’d forgotten to bring something to read. The new
Times Literary Supplement
was on his desk at home. He’d been keeping up with it ever since they’d given him a generally favourable review for the last book. The reviewer had been a rising cross-disciplinary star from Boston, about Kim’s age, whom Harold had never met. The kid had called him on a few points, speculations that the documents didn’t quite support. It was a small caveat, but Harold had been unable to dismiss it, and he still periodically sent forth a wish for the reviewer’s comeuppance upon some blunder in his own work.

Low Spanish voices up the stairs. He briefly suppressed the urge to turn, but when she was in approach, with the mestizo waitress behind her, he looked up, nodded, and stood to shake her hand.

“Harold Lystrander.”

“Hello, Harold.”

She didn’t bother to say her name as she took his hand with great surety. She looked a bit Irish. Dark hair and dark blue eyes. A full, solid body. A medium-tall woman in her forties, in loose-fitting, flared blue pants and a white blouse.

When he turned to sit back down, he noticed the napkin that had been on his lap was now on the floor. He got to it before the waitress did. She took it from him without speaking and went off to get a fresh one. Rosemary was seated now, waiting for him, somehow taller in her chair than she’d seemed standing, as if propped on all her small advantages.

“I hope this place is fine.”

“Yes, I come here myself.”

“I thought you might. Father André told me your field is Latin America.”

“That’s right. Mexico specifically. Or that’s where I began my career. As a subject, I mean.” He sounded like a fool but couldn’t stop himself. “But by now I’ve written around the lower continent.”

“Sounds like sailing,” she said. The waitress returned with his new napkin and a sparkling water for Rosemary. “I’ve already ordered. Go ahead if you’re ready. Thanks, Carolina.”

The young woman smiled at her. There was some confederacy here that extended beyond waitress and customer.

— What do you recommend today? he asked, in his best South American Spanish.

— The specials are all very good. They’re on the board. Someone just thanked me for suggesting the mariscos al quesillo.

There were Castilian notes in her speech.

— You’re not from Peru, I think. Is it Colombia? The Paisa region?

The question, which he thought had been innocent, seemed to trouble her.

“What would you like?” she finally asked.

He ordered the sea scallops, in English, and she left in double time.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to place her accent.”

“Better not to ask where they come from.”

“I guess you know her.”

She looked at his wineglass. Another calculation, maybe.

“I hear you wrote a book about Protestants.”

“Well, Protestantism.”

“Right. Of course.” Academics and their
isms
, she’d be thinking. She was no doubt gauging his response to the shift in topics.

“It examined so-called evangelical Protestantism in late-twentieth-century Spanish America.”

“I must have missed it.”

“There wasn’t a tour.”

Somehow she received the humour without actually smiling. There was no end to her ability to hang him up in speculation. She was very quick, this woman, and self-assured. Yet she’d done no more than enter a room, sit down, and offer some opening pleasantries. Harold decided she must be going through life on guard, owing to some past emotional disaster. She presented, to him at least, as a woman once betrayed.

“Father André told me about your daughter. I’m very sorry.”

“Do you know her?”

“We haven’t met, no.”

“That surprises me. I would think it’s a pretty small army.”

“I don’t have much contact with
GROUND
.”

She looked off across the room for a moment. Carolina was behind the small bar discussing something with a man in a cook’s apron. He too looked Latin American. He glanced at Harold and disappeared down the alcove.

“Is it true you take on the hardest cases, the people whom even
GROUND
turns away?”

“I’m not a judge. I take who I can. It comes down to resources.”

“But how do you know they’re not dangerous? If
GROUND
doesn’t take them, then by definition they’re likely somewhere in the range between dishonest and dangerous.”

“
GROUND
has its mandate. I have mine.”

“And what’s yours?”

“It’s a living mandate. It can’t be explained out of context.”

A shrill note from out on the street below. They both turned to watch a cyclist flying by blowing warnings with a whistle. People watched. A young Chinese man on the sidewalk looked up at him.

“I work mostly with what are called exclusion cases. People who meet the refugee criteria but aren’t admitted for other reasons.” “They must be pretty serious reasons.”

“At least one person thinks so. That’s all it takes. And we’re not so far removed from the days when the prime minister’s wife’s hairdresser was appointed to be one of these people.”

“But I’ve even gotten Kim to admit that the board gets most of their decisions right.”

“But who are they to decide?”

“And who are you to decide?” The sharpness was drawn from old professional debates. He hadn’t accessed it in years. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound accusing.”

A tilt of the head made her face more intent.

“I’m accused of something every day. Harbouring criminals, undermining the country, the justice system, the social safety net, the underground helper networks, the church. Almost no one
approves of what I do. Even Father André has begun to doubt. So don’t bother trying to be delicate with me.”

“Okay.”

His usual company of academics was full of enthusiasm or cynicism, sometimes both. He wasn’t used to those with conviction. It was one reason Kim made so little sense to him.

He said, “I guess I have a theory that I can’t dismiss. The attacker wasn’t white –”

“There are four or five million people within a short car ride of where your daughter was attacked. The majority of them are not Caucasian.”

“But investigations move along profiles. They exclude all the millions but a handful. Maybe a foreigner. Maybe doesn’t speak much English, that’s what Kim thinks, so a newcomer, and Kim worked with a lot of Latin Americans. And dangerous. Suddenly the pool is very small.”

“It doesn’t sound to me like you’re willing to dismiss your theory.”

“I just find no reason to.”

Carolina and the man in the apron brought the salads. It wasn’t a two-person job. The man took a good look at him this time before they both receded again.

Rosemary said that the people she helped weren’t any trouble to anyone. She told him about two who had made something of themselves here, and now helped with her work. He barely nodded.

“Your daughter has suffered, and you too. I’d help you if I could, but I can’t.”

Harold thought of how Father André had represented her in the warning. Even her friends were wary of her. André had called
her “a force of righteousness.” Harold felt he’d somehow already given himself away. She had learned something about him, likely even more than he could guess.

“I know perfectly well,” Harold said, “that if you were to suspect someone, you’d want proof. You could hardly risk your whole operation without it. And so if there’s anyone, you can tell me, and I’ll arrange things with the police so that you and your people will be protected.”

“I’m not running a resistance movement. There isn’t a ‘whole operation.’ I know it’s very hard to accept the randomness of violence. We’d rather that the world made sense somehow, and that’s what you’re trying to come up with. Sense. Meaning. Sometimes, Harold, there is no meaning.”

“I disagree. I think we just have to look harder and smarter, and that’s what I’m trying to do. And I think you can help me.”

“You aren’t taking me at my word.”

“And you won’t tell me why you harbour murderers and rapists.”

Her eyes widened on him. He’d set something in motion now. She recognized a certainty as blind as her own. Until this moment Harold wasn’t sure he believed his theory, that the attacker might have come from Rosemary’s particular circle of the underground, where she perhaps had met him, or knew others who had. Even if he was wrong, there was no reason she shouldn’t ask around.

“You don’t know my work. And you have a lurid imagination.”

When had he ever posed a real threat to anyone? The power, his demonstration of it in blunt speech, her response to it, made him a little high, and then a little nauseated.

Lunch was difficult but they stayed with it. She told him about her job in the public library system; he described a couple
of courses he liked to teach. They said goodbye without much warmth.

On the long walk home, he stopped to sit on a park bench and watch dogs run and wrestle around their dutiful owners, who seemed transfixed by them. Animals move us to wonder, Harold thought, because their seeming and their being are the same, while we live in falseness, from our fashionable shoetops to our mimicking tongues. The best we can hope for is that some brilliant artifice busts us back to the real, and not a bullet or bad luck. He considered taking in the new Matisse exhibit at the
AGO
. He normally made an outing of his gallery visits but today thought he might just follow his impulse. As if anyone paid attention to the routines of a man like him.

He sat there. A cloud shaped like Ecuador was stalled over the sun. Kim had been harmed. He was getting old and labile.

Not Matisse. Pissarro. The one with a little less mystery, the one with the conquistador’s name.

A small mutt in chase of a tennis ball came to a skidding stop in front of him as the ball rolled under the bench. The dog thought Harold was part of the game, apparently. It looked at him with its dumb, cocked head, and when the moment was held, it spoke an aggrieved yelp. Do you long to be understood? Harold thought.

He picked up the ball and tossed it feebly back in the direction of the group. The dog took off running and caught it on the first bounce.

One of the owners waved to him.

T
he surgeon examined his work and told her she was healing well. She thanked him, as if for a compliment. He was quick, senior. He would die on his feet. The news that she’d not been sleeping well lately seemed to disappoint him but he said nothing. She said she would ask her GP for another round of sleeping pills.

“Are you taking painkillers?”

“Not anymore. But it hurts sometimes. It’s one of the things that keeps me awake.”

“Think of the pain as a sign of healing.”

“But it’s not in this case, is it? It’s just my leg telling me it’s torn to shit.”

“I see torn to shit a lot and this isn’t it.”

He had her walk across the room in her underwear and medigown. It didn’t occur to him apparently that the problems this presented might not be physical. She walked the way she walked, not limping but with slightly foreshortened steps. She did a slow-motion runway turn and walked back.

He said her step was slightly foreshortened, and told her she’d be better off without the sleeping pills for a while, as if the one gave him a read on the other.

That evening she allowed herself to be summoned to a hotel rooftop bar to see her lapsed friend Shenny. They’d met as under-grads and moved to New York at the same time, sharing a dark apartment at 90th and Broadway for two years while Shenny went to film school and Kim mostly failed to attend graduate classes. After the attack Kim refused visits, but because Shenny had found the sublets for her apartment, whether or not they were friends anymore, Kim owed her the get-together.