CHAPTER SEVEN
A faint evening rain fell over Camp Patience. Back in Sarat’s childhood home the rain used to make a sharp sound as it hit the shipping container’s roof. But here in the camp it was a whispered admonition, a soft shh against the tattered tents.
Sarat listened. She lay in her cot, her mother and sister asleep nearby. Through the window flap a soft line of silver moonlight illuminated her sleeping sister’s face.
Their mother once said they were two birds hatched from the same egg, the same bones and blood inside them. And although Sarat had read one of Gaines’s books on genetics and now knew that wasn’t entirely true, she still liked to believe it. Whenever she got to thinking about why Dana’s skin was light and hers dark, or why Dana’s hair fell straight and bright and hers, before she shaved it, was fuzzy, she told herself that these things didn’t matter. What mattered was bones and blood.
She watched Dana sleeping, her face cast in alabaster light. She did a thing she’d done since they were little children: she held her breath, manipulated it until it synchronized with her sister’s, until their chests rose and fell in time. She lay still and breathed as her sister breathed and listened to the whispering rain.
At around four in the morning Simon stumbled through the door. He tried to move quietly but he was drunk and in the dark he stubbed his foot against his bedside locker. At the sound of his muffled cursing, a light went on in the back of the tent. Martina got out of her bed, as did Sarat and Dana.
“Go back to sleep, for Christ’s sake,” said Simon, struggling to get his boots off.
“Where were you?” asked Martina. “You haven’t been home in four days.”
“The hell it matters where I was? There a sign-in sheet I didn’t know about?”
Sarat could smell the reek of Joyful on him, could see he was that aggravated kind of drunk where even your own skin feels itchy as wool. She’d seen a lot of men at Patience get that kind of drunk.
Martina walked to the front of the tent. She reached for her son and grabbed the pendant she saw hanging around his neck. It was a bullet casing pierced near its top with an iron nail—the symbol of the Virginia Cavaliers. In the South every rebel group had its own symbol: coiled snakes or Texas oil drills or words drawn in barbed wire. The Virginia Cavaliers had a bullet with a nail through it.
Everyone already knew. For months Simon had been out with the rebels along the Tennessee line, sneaking in and out of Patience through the inlets near the northeastern border. And for months both he and his mother had simply pretended it wasn’t so. But on this night there was no use pretending.
“How can you go and do the one thing you promised me you wouldn’t do?” Martina said, looking Simon over like he was someone else’s son.
“Do I look like I blew myself up?” Simon replied. “I didn’t do a damn thing.”
“You’ve gone and joined them,” she said. “Joined the same ones who blew up that permit office in Baton Rouge, the ones who killed your father.”
At the mention of his father Simon’s face crumpled. He snatched the necklace from his mother’s hand. “You killed him,” he screamed. “You killed him with all your nagging about going north, going north. He was happy where he was, happy in his home, but you pushed him to do it. It was you who killed him, nobody else.”
She slapped him across the face and at the sight and sound of it Sarat and Dana were jolted but Simon did not move.
“What kind of child says something so cruel to his own mother?” Martina said.
“I’m not a child,” Simon replied. “I’m a man.” His voice was louder than his mother and sisters had ever heard before, as though the louder he said it the more true it became. “I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man.”
He tore the front door open and stumbled back out of the tent and when he was gone his mother sat on his bed and wept. Instinctively Sarat and Dana sat by her side to comfort her and in that moment Sarat had never hated anyone more than she hated her only brother. In the weeks and months to come both mother and son would dismiss what happened that night; both would say that it was just one of those fights every family has, that they didn’t really mean what they said. But Sarat knew each had meant every word.
Soon that old hardness set in and Martina was herself again. That night she stayed up well into the morning talking with her daughters. She told them about that day when Benjamin Chestnut went up to Baton Rouge and never came back. She told them about the night she went to see the rebel commander about refuge, and the night the falling bombs chased them from their home.
SARAT WOKE AROUND NOON, drenched in sweat from the midday heat, to the sound of Marcus at the door.
“You been sleeping this whole time?” he asked, handing her a juice cup he’d smuggled from the old cafeteria building.
“Long night. What’s up?”
“I was out by Chalk Hollow looking for turtle food for Cherylene and I saw a whole bunch of rebels out by that island across the lake,” Marcus said. “They had a ton of stuff with them, boxes and boxes.”
“They’re out earlier than normal,” Sarat said. “Can’t be coming into the camp in the daylight. People will see.”
“That’s right. I heard one of them say they’ll come back for their stuff after sundown.”
It took Sarat a moment before she realized what her friend meant. “So, you wanna go see what they got in those boxes?”
Marcus smiled.
They walked to the eastern edge of the camp. They passed Marcus’s tent, where his father sat on a plastic garden chair, a sweat-soaked rag over his balding head. With a pair of binoculars he was watching the Blue soldiers who lay hidden among the trees beyond the northern fence. Every few minutes he’d mark something down in an old notebook, like a birdwatcher deep in observation.
Marcus entered the tent and returned with a small Donald Duck backpack, into which he’d stuffed a couple of water bottles and apricot gel sandwiches. He walked briskly, a step ahead of Sarat. She was a full foot taller than he was, and the manner in which he walked—almost hunched, his eyes focused on the ground—only exacerbated the difference in height between them.
When he was with her he was a little more confident, but otherwise he seemed perpetually hobbled by shyness and anxiety. Some of the boys in the camp had started a rumor that, because of his size, he was forced to wear hand-me-downs from some of the girls in Patience. To Sarat, this kind of drive-by cruelty was a normal part of camp life (and even if it were true he wore younger kids’ clothes, what did it matter? Who cared?), but Marcus seemed especially distraught by it—so much so that she’d seen him walking around a few times dressed in jeans and shirts that were entirely too large for his frame, a decision that prompted a whole new round of ridicule from the boys.
But when he was with her he was himself. She enjoyed the feeling it gave her to know it, to be his protector, his confidante.
But there was something else, a comfort he unwittingly afforded her. It was the comfort of his smallness. The meekness and harmlessness of him allowed her to explore without fear her fluid feelings on attraction and companionship and boys, the hormonal gauntlet of adolescence. Other than him, she had almost no friends her own age, but she wondered if the thing he gave her wasn’t friendship’s only useful purpose—a testing site for new and unfamiliar emotions, free of hazard, free of judgment.
When they reached Chalk Hollow they climbed over the fallen trees and down to the bank. Marcus pointed to the small uninhabited island north of Smith Branch, about a quarter-mile ahead of them in the water.
“You see it?” he asked.
Sarat squinted. Barely visible beyond the shore was the edge of a raised tarp, although the things it covered were hidden.
“They said they wouldn’t be back till after sunset?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “I don’t know how we get over there, though.”
Sarat shrugged. “We swim.”
Marcus’s courage seemed suddenly to abandon him. With trepidation he looked out at the water, thick and murky, its surface the color of the soil.
“Well, how did you think we’d get out there?” asked Sarat.
“I don’t know,” Marcus replied. “I thought we’d get a boat or something.”
Sarat laughed. “What boat you ever see round here didn’t have a man with a gun on it?” She stripped down to her underwear and stepped onto the remains of a small dock, whose planks teetered unevenly into the water. “C’mon,” she said. “It’s not so far.”
“But my bag will get wet.”
“Give it here, then.” Sarat held the bag high over her head like a sacrificial offering. She stepped off the edge of the plank and into the water. Marcus took off his clothes until he too was only in his underwear, and then he followed.
The water was as warm as the children’s bodies and so thick with soil and mud that it hardly felt like water at all. With Sarat leading and Marcus struggling to follow, they shuffled along like paddling dogs. Marcus’s arms flailed wildly as he swam, but Sarat appeared to move with little effort, the backpack held high above her head, her legs doing all the work beneath the surface.
When they finally arrived at the island’s shore they collapsed on a small stretch of beach. Marcus lay as though crucified, breathing heavily. Sarat lay beside him, her legs burning.
The island had no name. It was small and had never seen much use. Once it was covered end to end with thick foliage, but now only the detritus of trees remained: browning stalks of deadwood, waist-high weeds, and ancient leaves, brittle as crackers. Near the middle of the island some of the tree trunks were still thick and tall, but nearer the shoreline they were short and sickly.
The children walked inland, following footprints in the soil. The trail led them along a jut of land that curled around the island’s western shore like a comma, partially hiding a small parcel of beach from the sightline of anyone standing on the other side of the water.
There they found the large blue tarp, held up with branches and planks of wood. The tarp covered about a half-dozen wooden crates. Most of the crates were nailed shut but one sat on the ground with its lid slightly askew.
The children approached carefully, listening for the sound of nearing boats. Sarat eased the crate’s lid aside, and peered at its contents. Marcus stood behind her, his attention split between the crate and the path leading inland.
“What’s in it?” he asked.
Sarat picked up one of the metal disks stacked inside the crate. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she’d seen it before. It was heavy and circular, like a thick dinner plate, colored the same shade of brown as the land on which they stood. Its edge was lined with equidistant markers and in its center there was something that looked like a fat black button.
“I don’t know,” Sarat said.
“Maybe there’s something inside,” Marcus replied. “Can you open it?”
Suddenly Sarat remembered watching the hopeless Red grunts with their metal detectors, clearing the earth near the camp’s northern fence.
“It’s a bomb,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s a bomb. They bury them under the ground and when someone steps on them they blow up.”
She could feel Marcus freeze behind her. “Walk away,” she said. “Go on down that path over there. I’ll be there in a second.”
“I’m not just gonna leave you with a bomb in your hand,” Marcus said.
“Just go, for God’s sake. What’s the point in both of us getting killed?”
“Better that than you getting killed and me having to explain what happened. I ain’t leaving.”
With Marcus peering from around her shoulder and her heart pounding, she carefully set the land mine back in the crate. A few inches from the bottom of the crate, it slipped out of her hand and dropped. Sarat watched it, waiting for the inevitable explosion, and then in an instant she turned around, grabbed her friend by the hand and sprinted toward the island’s interior.
They ran blind and mute through the thicket for five minutes without pause, until their exhaustion and the dawning realization that there had been no explosion brought them to rest.
“What…” said Marcus, gasping. But he couldn’t form an end to the question, and finally he just said, “What the hell? What the hell?”
Sarat couldn’t help but laugh, and quickly they were both in hysterics over their brush with death. Since their arrival they’d been careful not to make too much noise, but now they cackled.
They found themselves near the middle of the island, where the tree cover was thickest and the ground cool under the shade of the branches. About twenty feet up one of the tallest trees, Sarat saw a wooden observation platform, a lookout of sorts. Without a second thought she started to climb the thick hemp rope that dangled from the tower.
“What’s up there?” Marcus asked.
“Don’t know, but I bet you can see the whole camp,” Sarat replied. “Bet you can even see the Blues.”
She climbed to the platform and Marcus followed. Their view was obstructed a little by some of the nearby trees, but otherwise they were above most of the canopy. The world, Blue to the north, Red to the south, spread out before them.
They unzipped the backpack and ate their sandwiches and watched the vast horizon. In the distance to the north Sarat saw more acreage of browning forestland and a few dilapidated marinas and even the skeleton of a creek-side condominium near where the Tennessee River flowed.
From Albert Gaines’s many maps she had learned that there were natural borders and political borders. To the north the land looked the same but she knew there existed some invisible fissure in the earth where her people’s country ended and the enemy’s began.
They sat silent for a while, letting the sugar from the apricot gel slowly revive them.
“You mad at me?” Marcus asked.
“Why would you think that?” Sarat replied.
“Haven’t seen you lately. Came by your tent a few times, but you weren’t there.”
“Been busy, I guess.”
“Doing what?”
“Learning. Got a new teacher, comes by a few times a week.”
“I thought you said they don’t teach you anything worth knowing in Patience.”
“They don’t,” Sarat said. “But he ain’t one of them useless teachers the Red Crescent folks bring in. He’s teaching me all kinds of stuff they won’t. Stuff they’re too scared to teach.”
“Like what?” Marcus asked.
Sarat pointed northward. “Like about them. About all the things they’ve done to us over the years. All the times they’ve put what’s good for them ahead of what’s good for us. You can go to school a million years down here and they won’t have the guts to tell you a single thing about Northerners. But now I’m learning what they’re really like.”
Marcus observed the land to the north with indifference. “My dad told me the other day that my grandfather was a Northerner,” he said.
“Like, he fought for them?” asked Sarat.
Marcus shook his head. “Nah, just worked up there, on the oil trains up in some place called Williston. Died in that big explosion in ’69. My dad said the North didn’t care about prohibition too much before that, said if the same thing had happened in Texas they wouldn’t have done anything about it, even if it had killed a thousand. He said the thing about Northerners is, when it’s good it’s their good alone, but when it’s bad it’s everybody’s bad to share.”
“If your dad hates them so much, how come he’s always talking about sneaking out of here and going up to join them?” Sarat asked.
“Just because he wants to go there don’t mean he likes them,” Marcus said. “Just means it’s safe. If you had a chance to go where it’s safe, wouldn’t you?”
Sarat thought about the question. It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester—perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?
“I don’t know,” she said.
The sun began to set over the far side of Camp Patience. Sarat and Marcus descended from the lookout and walked back along the path to the edge of the island. Their underwear had dried on their bodies but it felt good to slip into the water once again. With nothing inside the bag, there was no point in holding it above the water; Sarat slipped it on her back. Her hands free, she swam with ease, gliding.
She’d learned recently that solid land was not the natural skin of the world, only a kind of parasitic condition that surfaced and receded in million-year cycles. The natural skin of the world was water, and all water on earth was connected. In this way she was able to make believe she was swimming not in some offshoot of the Tennessee River, but in that muddy place by the banks of the Mississippi. For a brief moment she was home.
AFTER NIGHT FELL she ate dinner alone in her tent and then she went to see Gaines. They’d settled into a thrice-weekly ritual: every night he visited the camp she would come to see him in his office. Sometimes he’d give her errands to run, envelopes stuffed with cash to hand out in the South Carolina slice. Eventually the Carolinians got used to the sight of the tall, bald-headed girl crossing into their neighborhood. In time the boys in South Carolina gave her the nickname Payday. But although anytime she walked through the hermit sector she had on her person more money than most of Camp Patience’s refugees would see in a lifetime, not once did she worry about theft or harassment. They all knew who she worked for.
After she ran the errands she would return to Gaines’s office and listen to him teach. Every night was different: sometimes they discussed the natural world, a textbook spread open on the table before them full of pictures of all the plants and animals that didn’t survive the planet’s warming. Most often, they talked about the way things used to be.
He fed her the old mythology of her people—the South of Spanish moss and palmetto fronds; of magnolia trees dressed up in leaves of History and History’s step-sister Apocrypha; of unmatched generosity and jubilant excess; of whole pigs smoked whole days and of peaches and pecans and key lime pie. She gorged on it all, delighted not only that such a world existed but that she held to it some ancestral claim. How much of it was real and how much pleasant fantasy didn’t matter. She believed every word.
He said that her country once occupied the most fertile land in all of the world; mother of sugar and mother of cotton and mother of corn. He taught her about the first time the North had torn her country to shreds. He said people think of that war now the way they think about most wars: just a bunch of young men killing young men on the orders of old men. But he said it was women who were left to clean it all up in the end, women who rebuilt the scorched Southern country and nursed what was left of those young men. He said there were even some women who fought and killed, disguised themselves in the clothing of men if they had to. Women who defied.
Sometimes he gave her what he called lyrics—a script of sorts, relating to something they’d discussed that day. Then she’d go home and read it over, until she learned her part of the conversation. And the next time he returned to the camp, they’d talk through it, as naturally as though they’d had the same conversation a thousand times.
What is the first anesthetic?
Wealth.
And if I take your wealth?
Necessities.
And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?
Acknowledgment.
And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight?
Family.
And if I kill your family?
God.
And God…
…Hasn’t said a word in two thousand years.
Good girl.
Sometimes the meaning of the lyrics escaped her. But she committed them to memory anyway. She was certain one day they would suddenly reveal their meaning; one day there might come reason to sing, and sing she would.
SARAT STOOD by the side of the administrative building, waiting for Gaines to arrive.
He was the only man she had ever known who could enter and leave Patience whenever he pleased. No refugee was ever afforded such privilege, and even the camp’s administrators and guards were forced to sign in and out every time they ventured into the Red. But Gaines floated past the gates at any hour of the day or night, carefree and without hassle, as though the gates marked not some severe wartime perimeter but the entrance to his own summer home.
Once she had been passing near Patience’s front gate when Gaines arrived. She watched the young soldiers at the gate smile and shake his hand, inquiring about his health and the health of his family. He in turn asked them about their families, about their wives and parents and children, and whether they were comfortable in their apartments in Atlanta. Then the soldiers, in a sheepish way, made it clear that times were hard for them and their families, that the Free Southern State was late again in paying their wages, but that, anyway, what was the use in complaining?
She watched as Gaines discreetly passed each of the soldiers a small envelope. The soldiers, even as they protested that they couldn’t possibly accept such kindness, quickly snapped the envelopes from his hand. In that moment Sarat saw the only sincere expressions of gratitude she had ever witnessed on the soldiers’ faces. Watching the interaction, she needed no one to explain to her that, between the flag sewn on their uniforms and the money in Gaines’s envelopes, there was no question where the young soldiers’ loyalty lay. It seemed perfectly reasonable then that Gaines should come and go through Patience whenever he pleased.
A little after eleven o’clock, she saw him walking up the path from the southern gate. Every time they met he had come alone but on this night he was joined by another man, a man she had never seen before.
“Sarat, I want to introduce you to a close friend of mine,” said Gaines. “I’ve known him for a long time, since we were both not much older than you are now.”
The man standing next to Gaines extended his hand. Sarat shook it. He appeared about the same age as Gaines, but his skin, the same caramel shade as Sarat’s father’s, was smooth and almost entirely free of wrinkles.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sarat,” the man said. “Albert has told me a lot of very nice things about you. My name is Joe.”
There was an exotic quality to his accent, the phonemes leaden, birthed a little lower down in the throat. She recognized quickly that he was a foreigner.
Gaines led Sarat and Joe into the administrative building and down the stairs to his office. Like Gaines, Joe appeared out of place in his neatly tailored suit and green silk tie. And like Gaines he seemed to take pleasure in the rigidity of his posture, his shoulders level and proud, his spine a ruler.
Inside, Sarat and Joe sat at the table while Gaines made coffee. He turned on the stereo and played the old classical song he liked, the one he called the song of the weary pilgrim. For Sarat he slathered honey on warm toast. She felt self-conscious in front of her unfamiliar companion, and ate slower than usual. But he simply smiled and observed her as though he’d known her since birth.
“Albert tells me you are originally from Louisiana,” Joe said. “Is that correct?”
“Yeah,” Sarat said, “that’s right.”
“It’s a very beautiful part of the world. I went there, some years ago. Very proud people there, very proud.”
“And how about you?” Sarat said. “Where you from?”
Joe seemed taken aback by the question, but quickly he regained his calm demeanor. He smiled at Gaines, then he pointed at one of the maps on the wall. “I am from the Bouazizi Empire. Do you know very much about the Bouazizi Empire?”
Sarat shook her head. “Just what Albert said, that it used to be a bunch of different countries and now it’s one.”
“That’s correct,” said Joe. “It used to be that all those different countries were ruled by kings and generals who treated a few people very well and a lot of people very badly. So we had a revolution, and finally we forced out the kings and forced out the generals and formed a republic, a democracy.”
Even more so than Gaines, Joe projected an air of serenity when he spoke. He was bald but for silver wings above the ears, clean-shaved but for a thick mustache that perfectly described his upper lip. Sarat tried to pinpoint what it was about him that imbued him with such calmness and finally she decided it must be because he was a visitor, an interloper, removed from the immediate consequences of the war raging all around him.
“So what you doing all the way out here,” she asked, “if you’re from over there?”
Joe nodded. “That’s a very good question. I am here because my country supports those who fight for freedom, wherever they are in the world. And that’s what your people are doing, isn’t it, Sarat, fighting for freedom?”
“Yes sir.”
Gaines rose from the table and walked to the bookshelves. He retrieved a book, one volume in a hardbound, green-covered collection. The writing on the spine and the cover was intricate and indecipherable to Sarat, the letters all conjoined, their peaks and loops like the road map of a hallucinated city. But Joe seemed to recognize the book.
“My God!” Joe said. “You kept them, all these years?”
“Of course,” Gaines replied. “It’s one hell of a gift.” He turned to Sarat. “When we were young men, Joe gave me a present, a collection of old Arabic poetry called the Book of Songs. It’s a very old, very rare gift, probably the only one of its kind in the Red or the Blue.”
He opened the book on the table and flipped through it until he came to a photograph slipped between the pages. He handed it first to Joe, who whistled in disbelief at the sight of it. Then he showed it to Sarat.
“Be kind,” he said, “and tell us you still see some resemblance.”
Sarat looked at the old photograph. It was of two lanky young men, one shirtless, the other wearing a uniform of brown camouflage, standing in a desert encampment. A little nameplate was stitched to the uniform’s shirt; it read: Joe. The two men looked to be in their late teens, about the same age as Sarat’s brother. They were smiling and had their arms around each other’s shoulders. The shirtless one was leaning on the butt of his rifle, the other one carried no weapon.
“How long ago was this?” she asked.
“Must have been ’21 or ’22,” said Gaines. “Around the time they sent us over there for the third time, right before the Fifth Spring.”
Joe leaned close to Sarat; he looked at the photograph again. “That’s right,” he said. “I remember, I remember when it was still your guns and our blood.”
For a moment Sarat thought she saw Gaines wince. He took the photograph from her and placed it back between the pages of his book and put the book back on the shelf. Then he sat beside Sarat.
“A few weeks ago we spoke about what you think you might want to do one day, when you’re older, when you leave this place,” he said. “Remember?”
“Sure,” Sarat replied.
“Well, that’s why I wanted to introduce you to my friend Joe. Because when you settle on what you want to do for yourself, what you want to do for your people, Joe might be able to help you. I know you said you might want to go to Atlanta one day and work for the Free Southern State, but you might change your mind. And then you might find that you need things, things that are hard to obtain, things even I can’t procure for you. But Joe might be able to help you. So I want you and him to be friends, and I want you to keep your friendship a secret, because there are lots of people who would want to hurt him if they found out he was helping Southerners. Do you understand?”
“All right,” Sarat said, even as she wondered what kind of help Joe might provide. “I won’t tell.”
“I’m happy to have met you, Sarat,” said Joe. “I hope we’ll be able to assist each other one day.”
She stayed with the two men until it was almost dawn, listening to them reminisce about the old war during which they first met. Much of the world they talked about was long gone, the old dynamics of power now inverted, but she enjoyed listening to it.
They talked about the years they spent in the part of the Bouazizi Empire once called the Arabian Peninsula, a place whose desert heart, once home to glittering oil-funded kingdoms, was now too hot for human habitation. Sarat knew from her geography and politics textbooks that these parched sandscapes were now lined with wave after wave of solar panels—blinding amber nets that caught the energy needed to feed and finance the empire. But the old men swore there had been cities—entire countries even—in these places. Millions once lived here, they said, before the temperature soared and the oil ran out.
In the early morning Joe said goodbye and left the camp. Gaines and Sarat were alone together in the office.
“There’s nothing quite as tedious as old farts droning on about the days of their youth, is there?” said Gaines. “You were generous to indulge us.”
“That’s all right,” said Sarat. “Every grown-up in this place talks all day about what it was like when they were young. At least your stories happened someplace far away.”
Gaines chuckled. “Well I guess that’s some relief.” He stood and lifted the blinds and opened the window to let a little air into the room. It was still dark outside.
“I’m glad I was able to introduce you to Joe,” he said. “I owe that man so much.”
“He save your life or something?” Sarat asked. “Back when you were soldiers?”
“No,” said Gaines. “I mean yes, I’m sure he must have, many times over. But that’s not all.”
He sat beside her at the table. From his wallet he produced a small wrinkled photograph, a high-schooler’s graduation portrait. The girl in the picture had Gaines’s smile, his deep-set eyes.
“Even back then, you could see it coming,” said Gaines. “Before the first bombs fell, before the slaughter in East Texas, everyone knew this country was getting ready to tear itself to shreds. I was worried for my family, worried about whether I could keep my wife and daughter safe. It was Joe who helped me. He found a safe place for them to live in the Bouazizi. They hated me for sending them away, but they’re safe there, and that’s the only thing that matters. That’s what Joe did for me. That’s the gift he gave me.”
Gaines folded the picture of his daughter and placed it back in his wallet.
“You know, I’d like to say you remind me of her, or that you two would have been good friends. But the truth is it’s been so long since we’ve spoken. Maybe if we met now she wouldn’t even recognize me. Maybe all she’d see is some old fool, some foreigner.”
He seemed then not to be speaking to Sarat, or even to himself, but to nobody at all. He stared out the half-open window.
They heard the faint patter of footsteps overhead: the camp’s administrators and volunteers, preparing for the morning shift.
“Why did you side with the South when the war came?” asked Sarat. “You were born a Northerner, you fought for the Northern army when it was still one country. Why not side with the Blues?”
“Well, after they finally brought us back from Iraq and Syria for the last time, I wandered around for a while before settling down in Montgomery,” said Gaines. “You see, we have a habit in this country of deciding the wisdom of our wars only after we’re done fighting them, and I guess we decided the war I’d been sent to fight wasn’t a very good idea after all. In the North, whenever anyone found out I’d been a part of that war, they’d want to debate it all over again, as though I was the one who ordered myself to go over there. But in the South, they don’t do that, or at least nobody ever did that to me.”
“So that’s it?” asked Sarat. “They were good to you here, so you sided with the Red?”
“No,” said Gaines. “I sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I’d had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.”
“So you think we’re wrong?” Sarat asked. “You think what we’re fighting for is wrong?”
“No,” said Gaines. “Do you?”
“No.”
“But if you did. If you knew for a fact we were wrong, would it be enough to turn you against your people?”
“No.”
Gaines smiled. “Good girl,” he said.
The sound of footsteps grew. Soon they could hear the workers upstairs delineating the day’s tasks: who was to oversee distribution of rations, who was to escort the immunization worker around the camp, who had to deal with the South Carolinians.
Sarat stood to leave.
“Hold on,” said Gaines. “I want you to take something with you.”
He opened one of the desk drawers. When he turned around Sarat saw he was holding a small folding knife. He opened it; the blade was of slightly blemished steel and smooth except at its lower end, where it turned to serrated teeth. There was a monogram etched into the handle: “YBR.”
“Do you know how to use a knife?” asked Gaines, pointing the blade toward her.
“Everyone knows how to use a knife,” said Sarat.
“No, everyone knows how to stab.” He flipped the knife and offered her the worn leather handle.
Sarat turned the knife in her hand. It was light and its lightness made it seem insignificant. She pushed her finger against the edge of the blade.
“It’s rusted,” she said.
“It’s not rusted,” Gaines replied. “It’s dull. But that can be remedied.”
He retrieved a sharpening stone from one of the drawers. The stone was black and rectangular. One of its sides was coarse, the other smooth.
He set the stone on the table in front of Sarat, and then he guided her hands until they held the knife against the coarse side.
“Resistance and stress,” he said. “All it takes is resistance and stress.”
He moved her hands with his. The knife scraped against the stone, even and rhythmic. The sound of it filled the room.
“How do you know when it’s ready?” asked Sarat.
“It’s ready,” said Gaines, “when it does what you need it to do.”
FIRST LIGHT CAME. Sarat said goodbye to her teacher and made for home. Outside, a soft morning breeze lifted swirls of dust off the ground. Sarat looked across the vast sea of tents; they looked not all that different from the ones that littered the background of the old photograph of Gaines and Joe. Maybe all tents looked the same in wartime.
In the distance, she saw two refugees fighting. One man, drunk and stumbling, had knocked over the other one’s jug of fermenting Joyful. The two men cursed and threw feeble punches at each other but Sarat did not stick around to watch. It seemed such a petty thing to fight over, so inconsequential.
Excerpted from: REMARKS BY KASEB IBN AUMRAN, PRESIDENT OF THE BOUAZIZI UNION, DELIVERED AT OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY (JUNE 4, 2081)
I have tested your patience, speaking for so long on such a warm day. But I want to say this again: the government of the Bouazizi Union has no desire to impose its will on the affairs of any other nation. I believe we are all in agreement that the end of the troubles your country faces will come at the hands of the people who call this country home, nobody else. (Applause.)
But I also believe that all reasonable people of the world—regardless of race or ethnicity or religion—yearn for the same right to liberty, democracy, and self-determination. These are truly universal human ideals, and what we do today to advance them is the most important gift we leave for our children. Wars are temporary; these principles are not.
I remember the first time I came to America, many years ago. I was a young university student, a student at this very campus. At the time, my country was undergoing a bloody but necessary revolution, a revolution that claimed the lives of many martyrs but granted my people the freedom they had, for almost two centuries, been denied.
I remember all the things that fascinated me about America—its vast and beautifully diverse geography, blessed with some of the most awe-inspiring natural wonders on earth; its equally diverse people, living alongside one another in peace, regardless of the superficial differences among them. I saw in the people of this country a spirit I had rarely seen elsewhere, a dedication to liberty so overpowering, it made of many, one. (Applause.)
I say to you now, in closing, that I see that very same spirit here today. Whatever challenges America faces in this troubled moment, I am sure the people of this country can overcome. They have done so many times before (Applause), and they will again. And I say to you that my people, the people of the Bouazizi Union who decades ago demanded from their rulers the very same liberation your revolutionaries once demanded of theirs, stand ready as allies to assist in any way we can. We are, all of us on this earth, drawn instinctively to peace, and I believe peace will prevail.
Thank you, and God bless America. (Applause.)