THERE WERE rules, of course, even that first night. The program would run on a six-second delay. This took some of the pressure off of Norma. The calls would be screened and everyone warned not to mention the war. This was good advice, not just for the radio, but for life, because these days, someone was always listening. Neutrality was the word Elmer kept repeating. Not to be confused with indifference, Norma thought. People, she should keep in mind, went missing for all sorts of reasons, and the show was not to be a sounding board for conspiracy theories or gripes about this or that faction, or speculations about a certain prison whose very existence was a state secret, however poorly kept. The show, Elmer lectured Norma, was a risk, but a calculated one. There were hundreds of thousands of displaced people who would form the loyal core of her audience. Hope could be dispensed in small doses to the masses of refugees who now called the city home. They didn’t want to talk about the war, he guessed; they wanted to talk about their uncles, their cousins, their neighbors from that long-ago-abandoned village; the way the earth smelled back home, the sound of the rain as it fell in bursts over the treetops, the lurid colors of the countryside in bloom. “You, Norma, just be nice, the way you know how to be, and let them talk. But not too much. Get names and repeat names and the phone calls will come in by the dozens. Ask nice questions. Got it?”
She said she did. The very idea of it gave her chills. Her own show. Of course she got it.
“Need I mention Yerevan?” Elmer said, as a final warning. “Need I mention that he is no longer with us?”
She went on the air that first night with a dry, metallic taste in her mouth. Excitement, fear: things could go wrong, catastrophically, with a single phone call. The minister of state had called the station, to say that someone on his staff would be listening. The theme music, commissioned from an out-of-work violinist, played, and already Norma was sweating. Elmer was sitting in the sound booth with her, taking notes, paying close attention. Three—two—one:
“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to Lost City Radio, to our new show. To all the listeners, a warm greeting this fine evening, my name is Norma, and I should explain a little about the show, since this is our first time.” She covered the microphone and took a sip of water. “No one needs to tell you that the city is growing. We don’t need sociologists or demographers to tell us what we can see with our own eyes. What we know is that it is happening rapidly, some say too rapidly, and that it has overwhelmed us. Have you come to the city? Are you alone, or more alone, than you expected to be? Have you lost touch with those whom you expected to find here? This show, my friends, is for you. Call us now, and tell us who you’re looking for. Who can we help you find? Is it a brother you’re missing? A lover? A mother or father, an uncle or a childhood friend? We’re listening, I’m listening…Call now, tell us your story.” She read the number of the radio station, emphasizing that it was a free call. “We’ll be right back after a short break.”
Cue music. Commercial. Norma could breathe again. No bombs yet. No explosions. “Well done,” Elmer said, without looking up. There were a few lines already lit up. They had been building up the show for a few weeks. The people were primed for this. The commercial began to fade. “Nervous?”
Norma shook her head no.
The engineer began his countdown.
“Now the fun starts,” said Elmer.
The first caller was a woman, whose thick accent said she was from the mountains. She spoke rather incoherently about a man she had known, whose name she could not recall at first, but who said he came from a fishing village whose number ended in three. “Can I say the old name? I remember the village’s old name.”
Norma looked up. Elmer was shaking his head.
“I’m sorry. You said the number ended in a three?”
It was all she had—was his name Sebastián? Yes, she was sure now and he came from the north.
“Is there anything more you can remember?” Norma asked.
“Sure,” the woman said, but it might get someone in trouble: private things, she said, there were dirty things. She laughed. This would be enough, she added. She would wait on the air for him to call back. She knew he would call. “I’m fifty-two years old,” she said slyly, “but I told him I was forty-five. He said he thought I looked even younger.” She spoke directly to her lover: “Honey, it’s me. It’s Rosa.”
Norma thanked her. She put the woman on hold, and the light blinked for a few minutes, then disappeared.
Meanwhile, there were others: mothers who called about their sons, young men about girls they had last seen in train stations or standing alone in the maize fields of their native villages. “The love of my life,” one man managed, just before breaking down, and in each case, it was Norma counseling, condoling, offering words of hope. “Are they thinking of me?” one woman asked of her missing children, and Norma reassured her they were. Of course they were. It was exhausting. Elmer was gleeful. The calls kept coming: from The Thousands and The Cantonment, from Collectors and Asylum Downs and Tamoé. Husbands confessed to have named their daughters after the mothers they hadn’t seen in a decade—but perhaps they were in the city now, perhaps they had found a way to leave that decaying village: Mother, are you here?
There were no reunions that day, but the calls never stopped. An hour after they had gone off the air, the phone kept ringing. Elmer twice changed the tape on the answering machine they had set up specially for the new show. He gave the two tapes to Norma the next morning. “For your listening pleasure,” he said. “You’re a hit.”
THE BEDS were prepared, the puzzle left unfinished, the lights turned low. Manau’s mother went off to bed, though not before giving kisses all around, and promising to knit the boy a warm hat. She asked what his favorite color might be, and he said it was green. She disappeared into a back room.
Norma still felt a buzzing within her. She wouldn’t be able to sleep. Even so, she said good night to Manau, then carried Victor to the sofa and tucked him in beneath a blanket. He didn’t resist being held. “What will we do tomorrow?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. It wasn’t just tomorrow she was concerned about; it was right now. Still, she told him not to worry. She sat in the armchair by the window. A dim yellow light came from the streetlamp. No cars passed. Curfew had begun.
It wasn’t long before Manau came. He said something about not being able to sleep. “Can I sit here?” he asked. She nodded, and he was mercifully silent.
She could guess some things by the boy’s age, but without Rey here to answer for himself, Norma was interrogating a ghost. Victor was eleven: where was I eleven years ago? Where was Rey? What were we like, and what wasn’t I giving him? She could kill him; if he were here, she would. At what point had their love become counterfeit? When had he begun to lie to her?
The most likely answer, she supposed, was that he had always lied. In one way or another. Hadn’t it been that way since the beginning? When they found each other again at the university, after his first disappearance, what was it he did? Remember, Norma, and spare him nothing. He pretended not to see me. Then, when you were there before him, unavoidable, human, flesh and blood, what was it he said?
“I’m sorry, do I know you?”
A fragile, tenuous lie; not that it hurt any less. Even now it made her angry, though it hadn’t at the time. It had shocked her. Left her speechless. She remembered now that moment of stark humiliation. She had imagined this meeting for months, had carried the missing man’s identification card in her purse at no small risk to herself—what if someone were to find it? And then to be dismissed so completely?
Later, he apologized; later, he explained: “I was nervous, I was afraid.” Later, he told her what he had lived through, but that day, it was all opaque, and she had to try very hard not to be disappointed, or not to let that disappointment show. He was not the man she’d met thirteen months before, certainly not the one she had recalled so fondly for so many nights, not the one she had daydreamed of while her parents fought like animals. He was quieter, thinner, less confident. His wool hat was pulled down nearly to his eyebrows, and he seemed to be wearing clothes that were not quite clean. There was nothing at all attractive about him that day they met again. What if she had walked away then? If she had handed him his ID and been done with it?
But that’s not what happened: instead, he lied, sadly, clumsily, and she stumbled on with her prepared speech. “I have something of yours.”
“Oh.”
She fished through her purse for it, and here, the moment she’d envisioned fell apart. The day had grown unexpectedly bright, and they were surrounded by students, strangers, noise. What was it her mother always said about Norma’s purse? “You could hide a small child in there. ” It was less a purse than an overflowing bag. A group of musicians across the way tuned up their instruments, preparing to play. Already a crowd was forming. Where was the fucking ID? Norma stammered an apology, and Rey just stood there, a bit uneasy, biting his lip.
“Are you waiting for someone?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“Because you keep looking over my shoulder.”
“Am I?”
She saw him gulp.
“I’m sorry,” Rey said.
She laughed nervously. It was March, a week before her birthday, and maybe she felt entitled to his time. Later, she would wonder, but now she dragged him by the arm to a bench, away from the crowd, from the musicians. There she unceremoniously tipped her bag over, spilling its contents: pens that had run out of ink, scraps of paper, a tiny address book, some tissues, a neglected tube of lipstick she’d used only once—she wasn’t that kind of girl—a pair of sunglasses, some coins. “It’s in here somewhere, I know it is. You remember me now, don’t you?”
She rummaged through the detritus, and he admitted he did.
“Why did you say you didn’t?”
But when he began to answer, Norma cut him off. “Oh, here it is,” she said. She held it up to his face, squinting against the hard light. She had meant it playfully, but she saw now, as color rushed to his cheeks, how embarrassed he was. There were new lines on his face and dark bags under his eyes. His skin had yellowed, and she could see the sharp outline of his cheekbones. Rey must have lost fifteen pounds.
“I’m not what you expected?” Of course, he knew better than anyone how this last year had aged him.
She pretended not to understand. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
She handed him the identification card, and he held it for a moment. He rubbed the picture with his thumb. “Thank you,” he said, and started to get up.
“Wait. I’m Norma.” She held her hand out. “I wondered what happened to you.”
Rey smiled weakly and shook her outstretched hand. He nodded at the ID. “I guess you know who I am.”
“Well…”
“Right.”
“Where did they take you?”
“Nowhere really,” he said and, when she frowned, he added, “You don’t believe me?”
Norma shook her head. “Sit down. Please. You’re running away.” He sat, and it made her smile. “Should I call you Rey?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I like you,” Norma said, and he didn’t answer. But he didn’t leave either. The student musicians were playing now, native music with native instruments, appropriately political lyrics. Nothing had yet changed at the university: banners still hung from the lampposts, walls were still adorned with ominous slogans. The war had begun only weeks before, in a faraway corner of the nation, and many of the students still thought of it with excitement, as if it were a party they would soon be invited to attend.
“You should have thrown it away, you know,” Rey said. “Or burned it.”
“I didn’t know. I thought maybe you might need it. I’m sorry.”
They were quiet for a spell, watching the students, listening to the band. “I was afraid something was going to happen to you,” said Rey.
“I have better luck than that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” She turned to him. “And you are too. So you must not be as unlucky as you think.”
He gave her a weak smile and seemed to hesitate. Then he took off his wool hat. It was too hot for something like that anyway. He had gone white at the temples, shocking streaks of it on otherwise black hair. Or had she not noticed it that night, one year before? How could she not have?
He scratched his head. “Very lucky, I know,” he murmured. “It’s what everyone says.”
THINGS WERE unquestionably bad. The curfew had been tightened, the IL raids on police stations had increased; at the edge of the city, control of the Central Highway was fought over each night after dark. These were days of fear on all sides. For sympathizers, when it was over, it would seem that victory had been tantalizingly close, but this was a misreading of the situation. The IL was desperate for a decisive military victory; recruitment was down, and many thousands had been killed. The apparatus of the state had proved, after a decade of war, to be more resilient than anyone had expected. In this, the final year of the war, the IL had all but lost control of its far-flung fighters. Actions in the provinces were highly decentralized, tactically dubious, and often brazen to the point of being ill-conceived. Heavy losses were inflicted on increasingly isolated bands of fighters. Some platoons responded by retreating deeper into the jungle, no longer warriors and true believers but seminomadic tribes of armed and desperate boys. When the war ended suddenly, they refused to put down their weapons. They continued fighting, because they could think of nothing else to do.
Meanwhile, the IL leadership focused on what it could control directly: the urban war, the central front of which was the embattled district of Tamoé, at the northeastern edge of the city, a slum of one million bordering the Central Highway. The idea was to use Tamoé as staging ground from which to choke off the city: attack food convoys from the fertile Central Valley, starve the city, spark food riots, and then glory in the chaos. They very nearly succeeded. For the six months before the government offensive on Tamoé, the bluffs overlooking the Central Highway were the backdrop for great and violent confrontations. The insurgents laid bombs along the roadside and disappeared into the overcrowded neighborhoods of Tamoé. Truck drivers were kidnapped, their cargo set ablaze. Police checkpoints were attacked with stolen grenades. The army responded by increasing patrols in the area, and were greeted by snipers hidden in the hills or on rooftops.
In May of that year, a girl of five was killed in Tamoé, by a bullet of indeterminate origin. There were soldiers in the area, searching for a sniper. An angry mob gathered around the soldiers. More shots were fired, and the crowd grew. A soldier was killed. The Battle of Tamoé had begun. When this uprising was quelled, the war would be over.
But all of this happened after Rey left the city for the last time. If it weren’t for the boy, his son, Rey might not have returned to the jungle at all. His contact had disappeared, left him without any further direction, and it amounted to a welcome vacation. But he went anyway, because he couldn’t get the boy out of his mind. When he heard of the battle, he was in the jungle, far enough away to suppose he was safe. He spent an evening with the rest of the village, listening to the radio for news, and was surprised to find that the IL’s defeat did not surprise him. It was an all-or-nothing proposition, and it always had been: so now there was nothing. The tanks that ran through the narrow streets, the blocks and blocks burned to the ground, the fighting that raged for four days house to house—in their hearts, hadn’t everyone known this was coming? In the aftermath of the battle, while the government proclaimed victory and the rest of the city celebrated, the dry, dusty lots of the district became home to thousands of displaced families, all with sons and fathers missing: a city of women and children. The army kept them corralled together for weeks in a makeshift tent city while the government decided what to do with them. Rey would have recognized many of them, from his work there so many years before.
These are facts: had he postponed his trip by a month, he might have survived the war. If he hadn’t returned to see his son, a hundred young men and the handful of women camped a day’s travel from 1797 might have lived as well.
Rey arrived in the village only six weeks after Blas had left. 1797 was still abuzz with excitement, and now there were dozens of portraits that no one knew quite what to do with. Many were hidden away, others were displayed prominently in people’s homes. He found it strange, as if the village had doubled in size while he was gone. Everyone he spoke to had had a portrait drawn of someone, and all seemed eager to talk about it. The village had collectively decided to address the fact of its own disappearance. He was at the canteen one afternoon when an older woman stormed in, walked directly toward him. Rey was sitting with Adela and their boy. The woman didn’t waste time: after apologizing for interrupting their meal, she unrolled her drawings all at once and begged Rey to look at them. They were of her husband and her son, whom she hadn’t seen in five years. She spoke so loudly that the baby looked up and began to cry.
“Madam,” Adela said sternly.
Again the woman apologized, but she didn’t stop. She was pleading now. “Take these. Take them back to the city and show them to the newspapers.”
He coughed. “They wouldn’t survive the trip,” he said. It was the first thing that occurred to him, the first excuse, and it came out all wrong. “The drawings,” Rey added, but it was too late: the woman was not quite old, not yet, but in that instant, her face fell, and she aged a decade. She broke into a furious stream of words, berating Rey in the old language for his selfishness before walking off.
Rey and Adela finished their meal in silence. They walked back through the tiny village to Adela’s hut. He asked to carry the boy, happily observing that Victor had gained weight and grown in all directions. Adela was pensive, but he chose not to notice, focusing instead on his son, this magical boy who made faces and drooled with beautiful confidence.
“Are you going to take him from me?” Adela asked when they were nearly home.
If you listened carefully, no matter where you stood in the village, you could hear the river. Rey heard it now, a lazy gurgling, not that far off. He remembered the night he had spent, drugged, wading in the cool waters. The rainy season had passed, and now the showers that came were furious but brief. The sun, when it came out, was unforgiving. Adela stared at him. He had a difficult time remembering why he had ever come to this place.
“Why would you say something like that?” Rey said. He passed the boy to one arm and reached out to touch her, but Adela pulled back.
“You’ll take the boy one day and you’ll never come back.”
“I won’t.”
Adela sat down on the step, and Rey moved in beside her, careful not to sit too close. “Did you have me drawn?”
She nodded. “You’re going to leave me.”
“You have to destroy it,” Rey said. “I’m not joking. You have to.”
“I’m not leaving. You’re not going to take me to the city and put me in a little house and make me your mistress.”
The thought had not occurred to him, but it flashed now, instantaneously, as a way out. He turned to her hopefully, but saw immediately, in the set of her jaw, that she was serious.
“Of course not.”
“Play with him now,” Adela said, pointing to the boy, “because he’s mine.” She stood angrily and disappeared into the hut.
He didn’t want a mistress. For all her charms, he didn’t, in fact, want Adela. He was a bad man, he was sure, a man of convenient morals in inconvenient circumstances. Still, he could be honest with himself, couldn’t he? Rey wanted the boy and Norma and his life back in the city, and that was all. He didn’t want the jungle or the war or this woman and the combined weight of his many bad decisions.
He wanted to live to be old.
Rey sat the boy up on his knee so that Victor could look out. His eyes were always open, and this was what Rey admired most about his son. He was a hardworking baby: colors and lights and faces, he took them in with deep concentration. Rey tickled his son playfully on the stomach, and noted proudly how quickly Victor reached for his finger, and how strongly he held on to it. Rey pulled, and Victor pulled back.
The following day, Zahir returned from the provincial capital with his radio, telling everyone in town that the war was over.
NORMA HELD Rey’s hand when they checked into the hotel. It was a late afternoon of slanting orange light. Night was still an hour away. This was the first time, and they wore wedding bands Rey had borrowed from a friend. They carried dinner in a basket, as if they had come from the provinces. Norma covered her hair with a shawl.
“Yes, sir,” Rey said to the receptionist. “We’re married.”
“Where do you come from?”
“The south.” It wasn’t a lie, Norma thought, not exactly: it’s a direction, not a place.
“Girl, is this your husband?”
“Don’t talk to my wife that way,” Rey snapped. “You need to show more respect.”
“I don’t have to let you stay here, you know.”
Rey sighed. “We’ve been traveling all day,” he said. “We just want a place to sleep.”
Norma took it all in, saying nothing. The receptionist frowned, not believing a word of it. But he took the money Rey handed him, held the bills up to the light, and mumbled something under his breath. He handed Rey a key, and there was a moment of electricity right there, as it dawned on Norma what this meant and where she was headed. Her mother would not approve. Rey never let go of Norma’s hand. She was afraid he would.
It was an old building, where even the floorboards of the stairs creaked naughtily. Norma blushed at the sound: maybe she even said something about it—who could remember now?—and Rey laughed slyly and told her not to worry. “We’re here now. No one’s going to hear us.”
And no one did, because they were alone in the hotel that night. It was midweek. They might as well have been alone in the city. They went up early and came out late, when the sun was already up and blazing red in the sky. And it didn’t hurt, not the way she had expected it to, the way she had feared it might. And then afterwards, the most wonderful thing was being naked next to him, and the most surprising thing was how easy it was to fall asleep with him by her side. It felt safe.
It was dark, and Norma was drifting toward sleep, when Rey said, “I have nightmares.”
“About what?”
“About the Moon.” He breathed heavily—she heard it and felt it, because her hand was resting on his chest. “They tell me it’s normal. But sometimes I shout in my sleep. Don’t be scared if I do.”
“What happened?”
He would tell her, Rey said, but not then. He made her promise not to be frightened.
“I won’t be,” she whispered. She was stroking his face, his eyes were closed, and he was nearly asleep. “I won’t. I won’t ever be afraid.”
“Are you awake?” Manau asked.
Norma opened her eyes. The boy was still there. She was in the same strange house. A light was on by the front door, everything tinged yellow. It had grown cold, and she wondered what time it was. She thought of closing her eyes, of retreating again into dreams. Had she ever been happy? “I’m awake,” she said, but even this was a guess. Norma felt he was near—her Rey—she felt traces of him all around, even as her eyes adjusted to this half-light.
She hadn’t thought of her husband as alive in many, many years. Not quite dead, either, but certainly not alive. Not part of the world. If he had lived—and Norma had concocted all kinds of scenarios that allowed this—what difference, in the end, had it made to her? He’d never contacted her. He’d wandered the jungle, or escaped the country and fled to a more hospitable place. Perhaps he’d remarried, learned a new language, and forgotten with great effort all that he had previously survived? These were all possibilities, if she accepted that he had made it somehow. But it was unthinkable: how could he have lived without her?
The boy snored lightly.
Rey was gone, of course. And she was alone. The rest of her life spread out before her, vast and blank, without guideposts or markers or the heat of human love to steer her in one direction or another. What remained were flashes, memories, attempts at happiness. For years, she had imagined him as not-quite-dead, and organized her life around this: finding him, waiting for him.
“What are we going to do?” Manau asked.
She had spent all the Great Blackouts with Rey, each and every one, in a room just like this, darker even, telling secrets while the city burned.
“Some people call every Sunday. I’ve learned to recognize their voices. They’re impostors. They pretend to be whoever the previous caller just described: from whatever village in the mountains or the jungle.”
“That’s cruel,” Manau said.
“I thought so too.”
“But?”
“But the longer the show has gone on, the more I understand it. There are people out there who think of themselves as belonging to someone. To a person who, for whatever reason, has gone. And they wait years: they don’t look for their missing, they are the missing.”
She looked at Manau, unsure of what she expected from him. In a room just like this one, Rey had told her he loved her. “Is he alive?” she asked Manau suddenly. “Tell me, if you know. If you know, you have to tell me.” She didn’t want to cry, but she couldn’t help it.
“I don’t know,” Manau said. “No one does.”
THE WEEK of the Battle of Tamoé, the show was canceled. It was simply too difficult to screen calls. The answering machine filled up with the voices of worried, anxious mothers: there were tanks in the streets, and their boys had left to fight with ancient rifles that didn’t fire straight. Something was happening, and it was out of control. The district was being razed. News reports of the four-day battle were prepared at the Ministry of State, sent to the radio to be read as is, without comment, without any additional reporting. Elmer consulted with the senator, who asked the station to comply. Everyone knew of the little girl who had died, but she was not mentioned. In the official telling of it, the terrorized residents of Tamoé had asked the army to clear out the menacing IL. The Central Highway would be closed for the duration of the military activities, and emergency price controls placed on basic necessities. When this action was concluded, the radio announced, the war would be, for all intents and purposes, over.
Norma’s hour that Sunday was replaced by a prerecorded program of indigenous music. She had asked Rey, before he left for the jungle, if he ever came across a radio in the different villages he passed through. He said he never had.
“I would have sent you a message,” she said.
“You still can.”
So, from her perch above the city, Norma imagined him out there—where exactly?—listening to the radio, surprised to find that her show had been preempted, that the war was ending. Mornings, she read the news from Tamoé: it was spotty and deliberately vague, but someone like Rey would know enough to tell what was really happening. He knew the district, he knew what it meant when she said that the forces of order had advanced past Avenue F–10. He would know the center of the district had fallen, that what fighters were left had been chased into the hills. He would know that the government would not announce victory unless it was in hand. She hoped then that he wasn’t listening, that he was in the forest he loved, among the plants and the trees and the birds, that he would miss these unhappy days altogether, and return to the city only when it was finished, when there was nothing left undone.
By the middle of the second day of shooting, Elmer began making small changes to the prepared texts: fighting raged instead of continued. When these passed by unnoticed, he began culling some safe statements from the Lost City Radio answering machine, to be played on the air as firsthand accounts. In this way, the station was the first to report on the fires. Norma herself took some calls, listened as one or another desperate resident described the inferno that was beginning to remake the landscape of the district. They want our land, the callers said, they want our homes. The fire was still in the lower neighborhoods of Tamoé, and in the slums that bordered the Central Highway, but it was moving up the hill, and north from the highway. One caller after another made the same accusation: it was the army. They were setting fire to everything. They were bulldozing homes and setting fire to the rubble. At night, from the conference room, you could see the eastern district smoldering. By day, the smoke hung over the city, but was not mentioned in the newspapers or on most radio stations.
In 1797, the people gathered in the canteen to listen to Zahir’s radio. The reception wasn’t bad, and everyone took turns admiring the machine. Zahir, with whom Rey had spoken a handful of times, sat next to it, gracefully accepting congratulations on his purchase. By the third day, they were calling it the Battle of Tamoé on the radio, and the news was exclusively of a great fire. The shooting had stopped. In 1797, the villagers were crowded in—children, too, sitting under the tables, among their parents’ feet, or balanced on the windowsills. A soft rain fell, and Zahir turned up the volume of his new machine so they could hear, over the pitter-patter on the metal roof, about the latest block to fall to the army, or the newest official count of dead.
They listened as if it were a sporting match in which they had not taken sides. One woman thought she had a son who lived in this place—Tamoé?—but she couldn’t be sure. She sat uncomfortably, pulled a strand of her hair into her mouth and sucked on it nervously. She accepted condolences from the gathered crowd; her worry was authentic and her sadness complete.
Rey sat among them, unnoticed at first, but as the afternoon became evening, something changed. They had in their midst a real expert: the villagers were watching him. Finally, someone addressed Rey directly: an elderly woman whose voice he had never heard before. “Where is this Tamoé?” she asked.
“Yes,” the adults echoed. “Where is it?”
Rey blushed. “Tell them,” Adela said, and so he had no choice. He stood up, walked to the front of the canteen, and was, quite suddenly, a professor again. He had been a teacher all his adult life. His father was a teacher, and his father’s father, too, back when the town Rey had abandoned at age fourteen was a village no larger than 1797. Rey cleared his throat. “It’s the edge of the city,” he said, “north of the Central Highway, in the foothills of the eastern mountains.”
It meant nothing to them. “Is there a map I could use to show you?” he asked.
There was laughter: a map? Of the city—who would have such a thing? Adela had a map of the country, of course; he’d brought it himself.
The questions came furiously. Yes, he knew of it. Yes, he had been there. Was it big? He had to smile: compared with the village where they all sat, how could it be anything but? Hands shot up, and he did his best to keep pace. Who lives there? What kind of people?
“Poor people,” Rey said, and the men and women nodded.
“Where are they from?”
“They come from all over the country,” he said. The mountains, the jungle, the decaying towns of the north. From the abandoned sierra.
He was very polite, or tried to be, but the questions kept coming. Someone had turned the radio down: Rey could hear his wife’s voice, but couldn’t concentrate on the words. They wouldn’t let him listen. The villagers knew nothing about the war, and here they were, awaiting its end, wanting quite suddenly to know everything about it.
“How did it begin?” a man asked. He wore his black hair in a braid.
“I don’t know,” Rey said, and there was a clatter of protest. Of course he knew!
Which grievance was it and when? Had it begun that night he spent in jail as a boy? Sleeping next to his father on the damp floor, while an angry mob clamored for his punishment? Before that, long before that: everyone knew it was coming. But it had officially begun ten years ago, he told them. Nearly a decade. How? He forgot now. Someone was angry about something. This someone convinced many hundreds and then many thousands more that their collective anger meant something. That it had to be acted upon. There was an event, wasn’t there? Violence to mark a fraudulent election? An explosion timed to commemorate some patriotic anniversary? He thought he remembered an opposition leader, a politician well known and admired for his honesty, being poisoned, dying slowly and very publicly over the course of three weeks. The name escaped him now. Was this how it began? He didn’t know what to tell them, this roomful of curious faces; the radio turned down to a low buzzing and the evening having evolved into a disquisition on recent national history by an anonymous city-dweller. It was useless to plead ignorance in this setting. No one would believe him. The war, he decided, would have happened anyway. It was unavoidable. It’s a way of life in a country like ours.
The rain let up, and in this new quiet, the evening took on the austerity of a prayer meeting. He answered every question as it came, as well as he could. They had been at it an hour or more when there came the question he would die pondering. Had he ever known the answer? At one time, sure, but that was long ago. The question was posed by the owner of the radio, and there was an innocence to it that Rey appreciated, a genuine need to know, without a hint of malice. “Tell us, sir,” Zahir asked, already speaking of the war in the past tense, “who was right in all of this?”