Abroad, p.2
Abroad, page 2
She was good at being quiet. Living with the Umbri wasn’t easy. Her survival depended on positioning herself with the hunters, with the aunts who could coax the most from the arid ground.
The Umbri tracked time by growing seasons. Ido’s tribe had built a stone Sun Temple, a structure that took eighty years to construct; the three-ton boulders were heaved, one by one, up from the valley a mile below.
When Ido was fourteen, there was a blizzard. No one could remember a winter so harsh. The families huddled by their fires day and night, but the snow wouldn’t stop. All their food stores were frozen. The mothers were unable to produce milk. Seven nights. Ten. By the eleventh darkness, three babies and two elders were dead.
The priests prayed day and night at the Sun Temple. Reluctantly, they sacrificed a sheep. Then a goat, already frozen to death. Twelve nights passed. Thirteen.
On the sixteenth night Ido woke to see her father bending over her. He pulled her up off her pallet. From the frightened moans of her sisters, she knew where she was going. She hoped she was wrong.
Her father didn’t bother to wrap her in blankets. Her skin was coated in a thin sheet of ice.
At the temple, the priests grabbed Ido from her father and dragged her across the ground. She felt a sharp pain as her left cheek scraped against stone. She struggled, smacking at the priests. After a moment, another rock smashed her skull.
Blood ran down the frosted altar. Sharp clouds of steam rose from the snow.
Ido, fourteen years old, 10th century BC
2
The past runs deep in Grifonia, even in a topographical sense. Below the streets, a great network of black tunnels. Often I would wander into a stone opening that would evolve into a dark passageway leading to some other unfamiliar part of town. Though I knew it was silly, I had a notion of the Grifonian hill as a thin shell, bored into by former generations until it was fragile as a used beehive. In the beginning, I often woke covered in sweat from a recurring nightmare in which the whole place crumbled, throwing all of us down into one great, lethal heap.
My early days were laced with terrible loneliness and longings for home. Still, the fact that I belonged to the prestigious Enteria exchange—an elite program for Europeans only—cheered me. I said the strange word as often as I could. Enteria. Just uttering the term brought nods of recognition from Italians and looks of respect from the other foreigners. I wasn’t a brilliant student, but the letters of recommendation from my father’s heavy-hitter medical friends bolstered my application. I didn’t care how it had happened. I was here, my place exchanged with some Italian who was now going to Nottingham University. Often I wondered whom it was now wandering through that cold British web, shadowing the life I’d left.
Our initial orientation was held on a Monday, in the last week of August. More than five hundred students from all over Europe gathered in the auditorium on the campus, talking to one another in eight or nine different languages, voices swelling in a sickening wave. Having gone through two years at a big uni, I was used to the bedlam of large, crowded rooms, knew to coolly look at no one, to sit near the front in order to hear, but not so close that I would be actually noticed. Still, I almost fainted with relief when I saw Jenny Cole, a girl I knew a bit. We’d been on the same hall during our first year at Nottingham. She’d even called me over the summer to “connect” before the trip, though we had never actually gotten together; I spent my summer working to save money, and whenever I could get away, she always had social engagements.
Jenny smiled and flittered her fingers at me. Is there anything better in a strange place than someone saving you a seat? To be lost, and then found, even if the girl beside you barely even knows you at all? She stood and made a show of kissing my cheeks, then removed the huge red bag she had placed on the chair beside her and patted it, indicating that I should sit. She was a large-shouldered girl with thick, covetable wheat-colored hair and skin the color of freshly poured milk. Legs a bit muscular, maybe, wide-ish hips, large breasts, often slyly exposed from within expensive blouses and dresses that wrapped. She wasn’t heavy, exactly, but was the sort of healthy-looking person you could imagine gracefully surviving any sort of hardship or plague. It was the Jennies who’d rule come the apocalypse, whereas girls like me—the thin, meek reeds with quietly lovely manners—we’d all be swept away without so much as a parting word.
At university, Jenny had spoken to me only twice. I remembered each instance, because when Jennifer Cole spoke to you, it was an occasion. She leaned in slightly, as if she had the most fascinating bit of confidence in the world. Her voice was low and throaty, and if she really wanted to engage you, she spoke softly enough so that you, too, had to lean forward, in order to get that much closer to the secrets she held. Back at Nottingham, she had asked if I knew a certain boy she was interested in meeting (I didn’t) and if my roommate and I would consider switching rooms with her, as she was forever getting in trouble with the hall proctor for late-night noise. (I’d been willing; my roommate hadn’t.) In fact, I was surprised that someone like Jenny Cole had called me at all.
“Tabitha, thank God you’re here,” she said. “My other mates didn’t make it this morning.”
“You look well,” I said as we sat.
She allowed a small, disappointed smile and looked around the room. I tried again.
“Oh, this is nice,” I said, giving her purse a respectful pat.
“Yes.”
I looked at the label, then moved my hand away. My sister had once pointed out the same sort in a magazine. It had cost upwards of five thousand pounds.
“Is this real?”
“Of course.” Jenny gave me a frosty look.
I tried to hide my embarrassment by fumbling in my own cheap, fake-leather satchel. She looked at me for a moment more, then relented.
“It was a gift from Martin. My boyfriend back home. He’s practically divorced, or so he says. I met him at a house party, you know, one of those weekend things.”
I did my best to maintain a neutral expression. There was a reason I didn’t know Jenny well: she ran with a posh group I’d observed only from afar. Though Nottingham was supposed to be the new utopia of student equality, the class system was alive and well on our campus, with girls like Jenny circulating imperiously at the top, waving to the underlings as they buzzed about in the passenger seats of properly worn Aston Martins and posted photos of themselves at hunts and polo matches and dinners at large country manors. Though she had lived on my hall our first year, she was away so much I had rarely seen her. The posh group rarely stayed on campus during the weekend. For them, a better, smarter world was always waiting just a jaunt away.
I pretended to write in my notebook while trying to think of something clever to say. All around us students shouted and gossiped feverishly, as if they’d known one another for years. There was a buzz in the room of being in a place where others wanted to be. The people sitting to my right—a boy and a girl with multiple nose rings—were jabbering in some mystifying Scandinavian language. I continued to scribble nonsensical notes, as if absorbed in important business.
Just then the head of the program, an impeccably dressed woman in her fifties, stepped up to give a welcome speech in blessedly slow Italian. If we didn’t understand everything at first, she said, not to worry. Our Italian would improve in the course of time, and we could always take extra language classes. Thousands of students had gone successfully through this program, she assured us.
At first we listened politely, but as she went on the students began to get restless. There was no air-conditioning, and it was even hotter inside the room than out in the merciless August sun. After covering class schedules, the directora paused, as if not exactly sure how to approach the next topic on her agenda.
“You are here to experience our great country of Italy,” she began almost regretfully. “The art, the music, the food, the people.”
“Could this be more boring?” Jenny said—not even bothering to whisper—and took out her phone. “I mean, I can’t understand a word, can you?”
“I’m actually pretty good at Italian,” I said a little eagerly. “Want me to translate?”
Jenny shrugged.
The directora took off her glasses now and laid them on the podium. “So I must advise prudence. Grifonia, you see, is a lively city. A city of music. Of festivals and—”
“Fucking!” someone shouted, at which the entire auditorium rippled with an appreciative laugh.
“Some say so,” the directora answered, and then paused for another moment. Some Italians, I was beginning to note, were extremely adept at the dramatic pause. “Yes. There are temptations in Grifonia. Likely, you will be offered certain opportunities. Some nice, some not so nice.”
Another buzz rose in the crowd.
“Please, always keep in mind who you are. Enteria is a competitive program. You are guests of this university, and guests of Grifonia. And while we are here to help you, we are not here to save you. Be careful. You are responsible for yourselves.”
As she went on, I studiously took notes: Reputation. Emergency number, 327 368 4122. Travel in pairs. No phone out on street.
Suddenly I felt a pressure on my shoulder. Jenny was leaning over and peering at my notebook. She laughed out loud.
“My God! Taz Deacon, I had no idea that you were such a fucking nerd!”
“What? I—”
“Travel in pairs? This is your year in Italy. Good Lord. I’m just glad we ran into each other. You need me.”
The talking around us was rising now, but the directora wiped her forehead and pressed helplessly on. Jenny reached out and grabbed my pen.
Italian lesson #1: she scrawled.
“Stop!”
FUCK THE RULES
“Right?” she said.
“Exactly,” I replied.
Jenny smiled and gave back my notebook. Then, done with me for the moment, she turned away to chat with the other, momentarily more interesting girls.
3
At twenty-one, I had been in love with only one person. I’d attended a Catholic girls’ school on the outskirts of Dublin, which was exactly the sort of place those words can’t fail to conjure: uniforms, giggling, pranks involving bras and sanitary napkins, and an early fear of talking to specimens of the opposite sex. I was extremely shy, as was my best friend, Babs. We were an awkward pair, really, and clung to each other all during primary. Even in secondary, when the grip loosened enough to allow us to make other friends, neither of us was swept up into any particular group. Early on, I believed this was because of Babs’s brightly colored clothing and penchant for marine biology. Later I blamed it on the fact that my complexion was slightly darker than the other students’. Likely, it was both, yet neither. Our situation never bothered Babs, who seemed completely satisfied with the feeding habits of bivalve mollusks, but the isolation ate away at me. I dreamed of joining the cool girls at the lunch table, at the shops, at the weekend parties we knew must be taking place but we were never invited to. I would stare at myself in the mirror at home for hours, wondering what it was that made me different.
The fast girls, the ones with all the dates, steered well clear of us. Babs and I heard of the others’ boyfriends and what the girls were doing with them—blow jobs in the bathroom and all that—but we assumed that we would be ignored by the male species until college, if not beyond. Then, while I was serving cinnamon cake at the Christmas fair, a boy named Sean with large brown eyes and freckles came over and asked my name.
His ears, I noticed, were inordinately delicate—fine and white as bleached seashells.
“Tabitha Deacon,” I said.
“You make this cake?”
“What?”
“The cake?”
“Oh. No. Got it from the store.”
“Isn’t that cheating?” he asked, seemingly serious. “Aren’t you afraid of hell?”
“I’m a Jew. We don’t have hell.”
“Lucky for you.”
I looked at the cake, wanting to die. “It’s just for charity. The money. And it’s—it’s good cake.”
“You’ve had it?”
“Sure.”
He grabbed a piece and crammed it in his mouth, then screwed up his face and pretended to choke.
“It’s awful. Fucking God. I’ll take four pieces.”
“Four?”
“Sure. There’s loads of girls I hate here. I’ll give it to them.”
The next few afternoons, Sean was waiting for me at the school at the end of the day. Babs politely hung back while the other girls fanned out beyond us, smirking and jealous. What exactly Sean and I talked about is now a mystery. Movies? Algebra? I can’t imagine. After a while I would tell him it was time for Babs and me to go home.
The fourth day, Friday, Babs looked at me brightly.
“Taz, I can’t walk you home today.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got a project at the lab.”
“On a Friday?”
She didn’t bother to answer, just turned on her heel and retreated into the school building, ignoring my braying protests.
Sean, who was waiting by the gate, didn’t ask where Babs was. We headed out, shoulder to shoulder, toward Soldier’s Field, a place we’d eventually take to visiting nearly every afternoon. There was a green hollow at the edge of the woods where we would sit, even in the winter, when the ground was hard and frozen. He was a great planner, Sean. If it was raining he brought plastic disposable ponchos; if it was cold, he gave me hand warmers, the kind that heat up after you shake them back and forth. What could they be made of, those chemical concoctions? The next day I’d find them in my pockets, formed into the shape of my inner fists, hard as ancient bits of chiseled stone.
My first thought, as I followed Sean to that field behind the post office, was that he wanted a touch of this or that. And he did, really. But he also fancied himself a poetry lover. He would arrange us comfortably, then pull out a book and start to read. I would sit there on the plastic tarp, smoothing the plaid skirt of my uniform over my wool stockings, rather at a loss. How is a girl supposed to react to Keats? Does she gaze at the reader adoringly? Lie back seductively on one arm?
We will drink our fill
Of golden sunshine,
Till our brains intertwine
With the glory and grace of Apollo!
“It’s good, yeah?” he’d ask later.
“Yeah! Oh, yes.” I’d try not to look bored, waiting for him to either kiss me or give me a Guinness out of his bag.
When I heard the other girls at school describe their first grapplings with sex—on the floors of garages, or pushed down on the hood of a car at thirteen—I knew that I was lucky. Sean was my first, and it was a truly lovely event, the details of which I would never share with anyone, even Babs. If I went over it, you’d probably think us just ordinary kids groping in a guest room. Yet in truth, there is never anything ordinary about the discovery of another sixteen-year-old’s skin.
I was desperate for us to marry. I knew it was silly; we were much too young and no one stayed together from secondary to uni. Yet I rashly clung to the hope that we would. Surely Sean wouldn’t leave me to navigate the world alone as my older sister did, with her one-night stands from pubs and bawdy talk of cocks and balls and dizzying lists of demands and frustrations. Blew him for two hours, and not even a bloody text. I was terrified of entering her arena and prayed Sean would protect me from it.
Yet my boyfriend—oh how I loved that word!—with his thoughtfully packed rucksacks and those wonderful ears, was a year ahead of me at school. This was a gap we eventually couldn’t weather. He went away to Oxford, a place I could barely imagine visiting, much less attending. His going there only made me love him more, and when my mother dropped me off to visit, my mind fairly burst at the sight of those spires, those ancient corridors. It was a place, I knew, I was just being allowed a peek at. My grades weren’t nearly good enough for me to even apply. I was no more than a frog trying to climb the lip of a bucket. And after just a few hours in that hallowed place, I began to feel physically ill.
“Hello, Beanie!” girl after girl cried all over campus as I walked beside him. These were college women, wild and free. They cruised the quads on bicycles with handlebar baskets loaded with impressive-looking books. One knobby-kneed brunette even stopped to talk. Gazing into his eyes, she chattered on, ignoring me completely.
“Have you read the Sophocles yet, Beanie? The last bit at the tomb—ugh! I was up all night in my jammies, weeping…”
Sean was sheepishly quiet after this one rode off. Sometimes first-years were given nicknames, he explained. Beanie! It was disgusting.
A few hours later, a serious talk on his bed after that last sad shag, followed by a heartache so acute I couldn’t eat anything but broth and cocoa until the summer. Beanie. For years, the very word brought bile to my throat.
Sean rearranged me. Sometimes, in the months after it was all played out, I would look around and find myself able to pick out the other girls it had happened to, being left. You could see it—the slight dimming of the eyes, no matter how loud the laugh. Yet maybe the worst thing about it all was my mother’s reaction. Leah Deacon had once had true passion: my father, an Irish doctor, who lured her from Tel Aviv after a series of research trips. But after children, his interest had waned, as had her faith and mental health. As a result, her absolute favorite pastime was hearing about the boyfriends she never had.
Sean she loved the most. When he stopped calling from Oxford, she grew so agitated I became afraid. What had I done? she demanded one afternoon, her Hebrew accent cutting into the words. She was a small woman, her once beautiful face shrunken into sharp angles. Why hadn’t I managed to be more pleasing? Oh, it wasn’t that she was a complete throwback—equal pay for women and all that, yes, of course. But in terms of male-female relationships, she hung on to traces of the customs and beliefs of her former household, so if something had gone wrong, clearly it was my fault.
