Parable of the Talents (25 page)
"Everybody down," I said. "Down on your face!"
I could not see who obeyed me. I hoped all the sharers did.
I wasn't sure what the collar would do to Teresa when she tried to get out the window. Maybe it was a fake. Maybe it wouldn't do anything. Maybe it would cut off her breath.
Maybe it would collapse her, and cause her terrible pain.
She dived out of the window. She's a slim woman, quick and lithe like a boy. I looked up in time to see her arc out the window as though she expected to land on something soft or on water.
Then she began to scream and scream and scream. Allie Gilchrist got up, stepped to the window, and looked out at her. Then Allie tried to climb out to help her. The moment Allie touched the window, she screamed, then fell back into our prison room. Allie curled on her side against me, and grunted several times—hard, agonized grunts. I turned my face away, her pain twisting in my own middle. It helped that I hadn't been able to see Teresa once she fell below the level of the window, but I had already gotten a taste of her pain too.
Outside, Teresa went on screaming and screaming.
"No one's around," Allie said, still gasping. "She's just lying there on the ground, screaming and twisting. No one's even come out to see."
************************************
Going near the door meant pain. Going to the window meant pain. Even if you didn't try to get out, just being there hurt, hurt bad. Diamond Scott volunteered to crawl around the floor, letting her own collar tell her what was forbidden.
People complained when she crawled over them, but I asked them to put up with it and Di apologized and the complaints stopped. We were still human, still civilized. I wondered how long that would last.
"Someone's here!" Di said. She almost screamed the words.
"Someone's dead here!"
Oh, no. Oh, no.
"Who is it?" I asked.
"I don't know. She's cool. Not cold yet, but. . . I'm sure she's dead!"
I followed Di's voice, and spotted her silhouette, a darker shape in the darkness. She was moving more than the oth-ers, scrambling away from the body that she was sure must be dead.
Who was it?
Then, as I crawled toward the body, trying to be careful, trying not to hurt anyone, I had a feeling, a memory. I was afraid I knew who it was.
The body was sitting upright in a corner, against the wall.
It was small—child-sized. It was a black woman's body—a black woman's hair, nose, mouth, but so small
"Zahra?"
She had not answered when I called her before. She was a bold, outspoken little woman, and she would not have kept quiet in all this. She might have been the one to go out the window before poor Teresa. . . if she could have.
She was dead. Her body wasn't yet stiff, but it would be soon. It was cooling. It wasn't breathing. I took the small hands between mine and felt the ring that Harry had worked so hard to buy for her. He's old-fashioned, Harry is, even though he's my age. He wanted his wife to wear his ring so that no one would make a mistake. Back when Zahra was the most beautiful woman in our Robledo neighborhood, she was beyond his reach, married to another man. But when that man was dead and Harry saw his chance, he moved right in.
They were so different—black and white, tiny and tall, street-raised and middle class. She was three or four years older than he was. None of it mattered. They had managed, somehow, to have a good marriage.
And now she was dead.
And where were her children? I had another sudden, hor-rible thought. I felt for wounds on her, found scratches and dried blood, but no penetrating wound, no terrible soft place on her head. She had been brought in with the rest of us. Chances were, she was alive when she was brought in.
Wouldn't our captors have noticed if she were dead? We were all dumped into this room and locked in by way of our collars during the same few minutes.
After that, no one had come in.
Perhaps, then, it was the gas that had been used on us.
Could she have died of that? She was the smallest adult in the community, smaller, even, than Nina, Doe, and Tori. Was it possible that she got too much of the gas for her small size, and that killed her?
And if so, what did that say about our children?
************************************
After a time, I lay down on the floor, still crying, yet still making no noise. I could hear people around me moaning, crying, cursing, talking, but their words made no sense to me.
They might as well have been in a foreign language. I couldn't think of anything except that I wanted to die. Everything that I had worked to build was gone, stolen or dead, and I wanted to be dead too. My baby was dead. She must be. If I could have killed myself, just then I would have. I would have been glad to do it I awoke, and mere was sunlight streaming through the window. I had slept How could I have slept?
I awoke with my head on someone's lap. Natividad's lap.
She had come to sit against the wall next to Zahra's body.
She had lifted my head off the floor and put it on her lap. I sat up, blinking and looking around. Natividad herself was asleep, although my moving woke her. She looked at me, then at Zahra's body, then back at me, as though the world were just coming back into focus for her, and it distressed her more and more every second. Her eyes filled with tears. I hugged her for a long time, then kissed her on the cheek.
The room was filled with sleeping women and girls. I counted 19 of us including myself and. . . not including Zahra and Teresa. Everyone looked dirty and scratched and abraded, and they lay in every possible position, some sprawled alone on the floor, some in pairs or larger groups, heads pillowed on laps, shoulders, or legs.
My breasts ached and leaked and I felt sick. I needed to use the bathroom. I wanted my child, my husband, my home.
Near me, Zahra was cold and stiff, her eyes closed, her face beautiful and peaceful, except for its gray color.
I got up, stepped over people as they began to wake up. I went to an empty corner that I knew needed repair. A small earthquake a few months ago had caused a slight separation between the wall and floor in that corner. It wasn't obvious, but ants came in there, and water spilled near there ran out.
Gray had promised to fix it, but hadn't gotten around to it.
I moved people away from the area—told them what I was doing and why. They nodded and gave no trouble. I wasn't the only one with a full bladder. I squatted there and urinated.
When I finished, others followed my example.
"Is Teresa still there?" I asked Diamond Scott, who was nearest to the window.
Di nodded. "She's unconscious—or maybe dead." Her own voice sounded dead.
"I'm so hungry," Doe Mora said.
"Forget hungry," Tori said. "If I could just have some water."
"Hush," I said to them. "Don't talk about it. It just makes you feel worse. Has anyone seen our captors this morning?"
"They're building a fence," Diamond Scott said. "You can stand back from the window and see them. In spite of the collars they've put on us, they're building a fence."
I looked and saw maggots being used to string wire behind several of our homes, up the slope. As I watched, they smashed through our cemetery, breaking down some of the young trees that we planted to honor our dead. The maggots were well named. They were like huge insect larvae, weaving some vast, suffocating cocoon.
Our captors were keeping our land, then. Until that mo-ment, this had not occurred to me. They were not just out to steal or burn, enslave or kill. That was what thugs had always done before. That was what they did in my old neigh-borhood in Robledo, in Bankole's San Diego neighborhood, and elsewhere. A lot of elsewheres. But these were staying, building a fence. Why?
"Listen," I said.
Most of the room paid no attention to me. People had fo-cused on their own misery or on the maggots.
"Listen!" I said, putting as much urgency as I could into my voice. "There are things we need to talk about."
Most of them turned to look at me. Nina Noyer and Emery Mora still stared out the window.
"Listen," I said once more, wanting to shout, but not dar-ing to. "Sooner or later, our captors will come in here.
When they do, we need to be ready for them—as ready as we can be." I stopped, drew a deep breath, and saw that now they were all looking at me, all paying attention.
"We need to pretend to go along with them as much as we can," I continued. "We need to obey them and watch them, learn what they are and what they want, and where they're weak!"
People looked at me either as though they thought I'd lost my mind or as though it was good and hopeful news that our captors might, perhaps, have weaknesses.
"Anything they tell us may be lies," I said. "Probably will be. So any of us who get the chance should spy and eaves-drop and share information with the rest. We can escape from them or kill them if we can learn about them and pool our knowledge. Learn about the collars, too. Any little thing might help. And most important, most essential, learn about the kids."
"They'll rape us," Adela said, all but whimpering. "You know they will."
She
knew they would—she who had al-ready suffered so much rape. She and Nina and Allie and Emery. The rest of us had been lucky—so far. Now our luck has run out. Somehow, we'll have to cope with that.
"I don't know," I said. "They could already have raped us, and they haven't. But. . . I suspect you're right. When men have absolute power over women who are strangers, the men rape. And we're collared." I glanced toward the win-dow that Teresa's panic had driven her through. "If someone decides to rape one of us, we won't be able to stop him." I paused again.
"I think. . . if you can't talk a guy out of it or beg and cry and get his pity or bluff him into believing you have a disease, then you'll have to put up with it." I paused, feeling inadequate and stupid. I shouldn't be giving these women this kind of advice. I, who had never been raped, had no right to tell them anything. I told them anyway.
"Do put up with it!”
I said. "Don't throw your lives away. Don't end up like Teresa.
Learn everything you can from these people, and bring what you learn back to the rest of us. Even the stu-pid, ugly things that they say and do might be important. Their lying promises might hide a truth. If we collect what we see and hear, if we stay united, work together, support one another, then the time will come when we can win our freedom or kill them or both!"
There was a long silence. They just stared at me. Then someone—Nina Noyer—began to cry. "I was supposed to be free," she said through her tears. "All this was supposed to be over. My brother died to bring me here."
And all of a sudden, I felt
such
shame. All I wanted to do was lie down on the floor in a tight knot around my uselessness and my aching breasts and scream and scream.
And I couldn't. I couldn't let myself fail my people in one more miserable way.
And these were my people—
my people.
They had trusted me, and now they were captives. And I could do nothing—nothing but give them galling advice and try to give them hope. "God is Change," I heard myself saying. "Our captors are on top now, but if we do this right, we will beat them. It's that or just. . . die."
"I haven't been able to take my medicine," Beatrice Sco-lari said into the near silence. "Maybe I will die." She had, in the past year, developed high blood pressure, and Bankole had put her on medication. Nina was still crying, now gath-ered against Allie, who rocked her a little as though she were much younger. Allie herself was crying, but in complete si-lence. Beatrice Scolari stared at me as though I could pro-duce her medicine.
"Your medicine is one of the first things we've got to ask for when they start talking to us," I told Beatrice. "The very first thing we need is help for Teresa—if it isn't too late."
But they must have seen Teresa. They must have heard her screaming earlier. Maybe they just didn't care. They knew she couldn't get away. Maybe they wanted to use her to make sure we understood our position. "We ask about our kids and about your medicine, Beatrice." I continued. "Then __ ……..Then maybe they'll let us……take care of Zahra."
************************************
The younger girls cried and quarreled and complained. The rest of us sat silent most of the time. We had all been through one kind of hell or another. We had all survived enough to know that crying, complaining, and quarreling did no good.
We might forget that in time, but not yet.
Sometime around two or three o'clock, the door of our prison opened. A huge, bearded man filled the doorway, and we stared up at him. He wore the usual uniform—black tunic with white cross and black pants, and he was at least two meters tall. He stared down at us as though we smelled—which we did—and as though that were our fault.
"You and you," he said, pointing to me and to Allie. "Get out here and pick up this corpse."
By reflex, Allie got a stubborn look on her face, but we both stood up. "She's dead, too," I said, pointing to Zahra.
I never saw his hand move, but he must have done some-thing. I screamed, convulsed, dropped to the floor from a jolt of agony that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. I was on fire. Then I wasn't. Searing agony. Then nothing.