18.

The longing grows. I find myself gazing at her pale forearm: the two dark birthmarks, the fine black hairs. What, exactly, do I want? Not sex—too fraught with peril. What, then?

Her head leaning against my shoulder. Her hand on my arm again, as we walk.

Go ahead and judge me. You can’t think me more of a dumb-ass than I think myself.

Should Davit start school right away, or take time off for freedom and tourism? This was the topic of debate today in Mrs. N’s kitchen. While Eka’s son slept on a cot in her room, I argued that he deserved a chance to breathe before joining the masses in bondage. (Unspoken: Let him spend time with you while you can still walk.) Ever my opposite, Bob thought Davit might be happier in school with kids his own age than hanging around here, i.e., with the living dead. Eka wasn’t sure. She wanted him to enjoy America, but not if it meant falling behind.

Davit had his own ideas. “I want to play with the school basketball team,” he said when he joined us, in baggy yellow Lakers shorts and a T-shirt with Tupac spray-painted across the chest. “I don’t want to lose the season.”

She stroked his knuckles. And so it was decided.

I doubt the team roster includes any white players, or that he’ll make the cut, but I kept my mouth shut. Let him have his dreams for a day.

With his last bite of egg still in his mouth, he asked if we could visit the high school now. So much for freedom.

The building, which I’d never seen before, is a low concrete box that keeps going and going, window after window. I found it dismal, but Davit grinned ecstatically, perhaps because we’d arrived during an early lunch period and found hordes of his peers outside. Kids in hooded sweatshirts lined the ledge by the side door like starlings on a wire. A girl twirled on the ball of one foot, playfully; others texted on their phones. Most of the females looked like children, though extremely sexual children. A few wore tight tan pants and black boots, like horsewomen, a style one doesn’t expect to see in a blue-collar town. The world has changed since I shut myself in my basement twenty years ago.

Davit courageously let his mother hold his hand. He soaked in the spectacle around him, studying sneakers and exposed bellies. Some laughing Latinas bumped into us as we entered, excused themselves, checked out the new kid holding mom’s hand, and broke down in giggles. Whether they were laughing at him or attracted, I can’t say; either way, Davit gave them an exuberant smile that set off a fresh round of hysterical titters.

A pancaked woman informed us pleasantly that Davit can start as soon as they fill out an application and provide the necessary documents. She asked if he was excited about coming to a new country, and he said, “Yes, very much.”

In order to apply, however, we needed to go to Central Registration on Belleville Avenue.

Before we left, Davit told the secretary that he wanted to join the basketball team, and hoped to meet the coach. His friendly assertiveness surprised us, and got results. The coach didn’t answer his phone, but the secretary sent us to meet the athletic director, a woman with JFK’s haircut, wearing a tracksuit. She asked if Davit had played for his school team in Georgia.

“My school has no team. I played for Academy Tbilisi—the youth team. You have heard of it?”

She smiled. “Sorry, I haven’t.”

“Viktor Sanikidze played for Academy Tbilisi before NBA.”

Perhaps because we were with him, she didn’t shoo Davit away. “If you’re really good,” she said, “then you’ll be very welcome. I have to tell you, we’re not exactly a power.”

She told Davit to check back with her on his first day of school. The season has already started—practices, not games—but she’ll make sure the coach gives him a tryout. “We had a kid from Bosnia a few years back. What a shooter. He could sink three pointers from midcourt. I think it’s because they didn’t have iPods over there—they had nothing else to do.”

If Davit was excited before, he bubbled over on the way to Central Registration. Humming to himself in the back-seat, he tapped what I assume was a hip-hop rhythm on the window. His eyes, in my mirror, saw past the little houses with their flags and aluminum awnings, past the tract of new condos, past the spooky, broad-shouldered cancer hospital, straight into the future.

Central Registration had other ideas, however.

Though housed in a mundane tan trailer behind Belleville School Ten, the tiny office wields as much bureaucratic power as the IRS. The documents Eka will need to produce include Davit’s school and immigration records, and legal papers stating that she has full custody and the authority to make all decisions regarding his education.

“I have no legal papers,” Eka protested. “His father leaves when he is born.”

“It’s a state law,” the weary registrar said. “Who was he living with before he came here?”

“My mother.”

“Then your mother can sign a notarized letter and fax or mail it.”

“Where is notary?” Eka complained. “I never hear of notary in Georgia.”

The woman patiently explained that they’ve had cases where divorced parents brought their children to the United States without the other parent’s permission, basically kidnapping them. That’s why this law was passed.

Eka didn’t say so, but I think she doubted her mother’s ability to procure the necessary papers. Davit encouraged her in Georgian, and rubbed her back as if he were the wise parent and she the anxious child.

So he’ll have a bit of freedom after all, whether he wants it or not. “Now you’ll have time to do some sightseeing,” I told him.

“Excellent,” he said, and gazed somewhere beyond the pink and yellow notices stapled to the bulletin board.

I had a short-lived fantasy of taking him around Manhattan myself, since his mother won’t get another day off for almost two weeks. But my knees, ankles, and lungs won’t allow it.

The drive home was deafeningly quiet.

Eka fixed Mrs. N her afternoon snack and left her with Davit and Bob in the kitchen, watching one of the Terminator movies on the little TV on the counter. After calling her mother about the required documents, she joined me on the living room couch for another interview. This was her idea, not mine: with Davit here, the need for posthumous income has become more urgent than ever.

I learned that she went to the university and worked as a nurse in Georgia, in a hospital radiology department. She wanted to work as a nurse here, but first she has to take the licensing exam, in English, which presents a formidable obstacle. She has the book, she’s been studying it ever since she arrived, but she’s so tired at the end of the day, she can barely keep her eyes open. “Sometime I am discourage,” she confessed.

She learned German in school, not English. When she first came here, it was stressful, not speaking the language. In the street one time, without her dictionary, she had to call friends at home and ask them to look up an English word she didn’t understand.

Before coming over, she arranged to stay with her cousins in Brooklyn for a short time. A friend of theirs told her about an agency that places Georgian women as home health aides. The agency charged a hundred dollars just to send her for an interview. Once the family hired her, she had to pay the agency three weeks’ salary in cash.

They didn’t train her. She has back problems now, from “lifting ladies.”

She had hoped to learn English by talking to her elderly employers, but none of them talked to her much. Mrs. Prestifilippo said she couldn’t understand a word Eka said. So she ended up watching TV with them—“to keep brain alive.” She still watches Law and Order in all its varieties, and many shows involving medicine, some with living patients, others with corpses that serve as clues. (I could have been teaching her English for the past four years. I could have helped her study for the nursing test. Had I known, I might have volunteered. Or, sigh, I might not.)

Picture me beside her on Mrs. N’s overstuffed sofa: pen in hand, notebook on thigh, scribbling a note now and then, like a suitor with one eye on the chaperones through the doorway—imagining Eka imprisoned in the homes of the taciturn elderly—tenderly questioning this woman twenty years my junior (but no longer young), who has come to rely on me, striving to concentrate on her words, in vain because the other feeling kept pushing through, insistent as a dog’s snout in your crotch—reminding myself that I am, as they say, old enough to be her father—burning to rest my hand on her pant leg, while in the kitchen tires squealed, a shotgun blasted, glass shattered, and Davit laughed.

“Sometime,” she said, “they want too much. I have one day off, but they call to tell I must return early. They don’t buy the food I ask to buy. I don’t got car, I can’t go buy it. What I should eat? Sometime we make conflict, arguing. Always I am tired. And missing family. This is great country, but work is hard.”

Her eyelids kept twitching: symptoms of something more serious than emotion or fatigue. She leaned back and rested her head against the loud roses.

“You haven’t told Davit about your sickness?”

“I told him I have little flu.”

If he believes that, then the human capacity for self-deception is greater than I knew.

“Have you gone back to the doctor since your diagnosis?”

The corners of her mouth pulled back, a resigned pout. “He can’t do nothing. He tells me he is sorry.”

“Still, you should be under a doctor’s care.” She looked at her lap. “I don’t got insurance.”

While I brooded over the failings of our health care system, she turned to a more immediate concern. “Do you know how can I get insurance for Davit? For if he is sick?”

Mrs. N barked Eka’s name. She left me to escort her employer to the bathroom.

I daydreamed. I still have my health coverage, presumably. If she were my wife, she’d have it, too. And Davit. I should offer to marry her, just for that.

(My wife. Two words we haven’t seen together before. They look wrong, side by side—like enraged walnut.)

What would she say if I proposed? I could make it clear that I’m just trying to set her up with medical care. Even so, she might refuse—claiming that she never legally divorced, while privately fearing what I might demand in return.

Imagine: she’s my wife, but I’m not allowed to touch her.

Did she do this intentionally? Smile at the lonely slob until his common sense melted, with precisely this goal?

No, I don’t think so.

The Shitmobile finally died, outside Quick Chek. A dainty young mother, Brazilian, I think, strapped her twins into her Chevy Blazer and hooked me up to her jumper cables. She suggested I drive straight to the mechanic a few blocks down.

They think I need a new alternator. In the instant before I gave them the go-ahead, I considered letting them scrap the car, but reconsidered. If I keep it in working order, I can bequeath it to Davit.

The walk home, a hellish half-mile marathon, almost finished me. The weight of the milk and grapefruit juice in the plastic bag cut off the circulation in two fingers. Reaching home was not guaranteed. A logician might scoff: What’s the worst that could have happened? That you’d drop dead en route, and be done? But logic misses the point. Dying when and how I choose is one thing; collapsing on a public sidewalk like a tuna cast up on the beach is another entirely.

Panting and cursing, ankles in agony (imagine a splintered bone pressing into your flesh with each step: that would have been comfortable by comparison), I ran into Bob and Davit at the corner of Stephens and Holmes. Davit had a little Kmart bag. Bob had walked him over there to show him a bit of America, and Davit had bought a candy bar and a 50 Cent CD from the discount rack. Sourly, I thought, He should be saving his money—especially since his mother earned it through grueling servitude, and won’t be earning much more.

We were about to enter our separate mouseholes when Davit pointed to the old backboard behind the house. “I can use this?” he asked me.

“I don’t see why not”—a challenging phrase for him to disentangle, but he managed.

“There is a ball?”

I directed him to the faded blue tub by the tool shed, where Garrett used to keep a basketball and a pump. With steady effort, Davit turned the flabby, faded rubber into a firm sphere that rang when bounced. Bob played with him— not exactly energetically, but with remembered skills—and Davit went easy on the old monk, letting him take jump shots until he sank one. Turning away in envy, I saw Eka at the kitchen window, watching her son while washing dishes.

Beatified is the only word for that face.

Kai or Ahvo stopped by awhile ago. Somber in his dark overcoat, he trod the creaky boards up to the back door. He had come to tell Eka that Davit can’t stay with her. Their mother is old and sick, he said. She’s entitled to some privacy and comfort. Also, Eka abandoned her twice in the last two days, leaving her with an untrained stranger, i.e., Bob. The Nieminen family understands how much it means to Eka to be reunited with her son, but this can’t go on.

They’re Huns in Social Democrats’ clothing, these twin Finns. Bland, pudgy, with thin sandy hair, they cultivate an image of reasonable pleasantness. Meanwhile, they pillage without mercy.

She told me about the eviction in my vestibule. There were no tears; she’d cried already, and dried her face before coming to me. The evidence was still in her veined, red eyes, however. My first impulse was to stalk the sonofabitch to his home and drive through the living room window. I went with my second idea instead: “He can stay with me.”

She hugged me for that. I should have luxuriated in the pressing of flesh, which may never come again, but all I could do was stand stiffly, a model of probity, and deny that I crave this and more.

Recollecting her breasts pressed against mine, I also recall the vibration that passed from her to me. This reminder of her condition sent dread all the way to my fingertips, even as I told her, “Everything will be all right.”

What I said the other day about the circus coming through: add to that an Eastern European basketball player, sixteen years old, with a knapsack and duffel bag, camped out on my living room floor. Inexplicably, I don’t mind. What’s one more body in the cellar? The more the merrier.