Sparkers (2 page)

A
fter my weekend shifts at Tsipporah's stall, I always stop by my best friend's, so once the auto is out of sight, I head for her place. The streets of Horiel District are lined with apartment buildings, all built of a yellowish brick that has darkened over the years. The paint on most doors and shutters is chipped or faded, and here and there a broken window is boarded up because its owner can't afford to replace the glass.

When I reach the Avrams' building on Old Spinners' Street, I climb the stairs to the second story. My friend Leah greets me at her door with little Ari in her arms. She has four younger siblings and spends most of her spare time helping to take care of them.

“I was wondering when you'd come,” she says, prying her long black braid from her brother's grip and tossing it over her shoulder. “Did something keep you?”

“Yes,” I say, my stomach twisting.

I follow her into the apartment. The empty kitchen smells of mint tea and cinnamon, and someone has left a pair of mittens on the floor. Leah offers me a chair at the cluttered kitchen table and then plops down with her brother in her lap.

The table is strewn with my friend's school papers. A notebook opened to a lesson on literary figures of the last century partially covers a loose page of geometric proofs. Next to that is a list of the kasir inventors who developed, among other things, the automobile and the electric light. The vast majority of her notes, however, feature scrawled evolutionary trees, diagrams of plant cells, and sketches of beaks and fangs. The mundane sight makes me feel better.

“Cramming?” I say.

“As much as Ari will let me,” Leah says wryly.

“There's more to the SSE than biology,” I observe.

She grins. “Might as well play to my strengths, right?”

We're both fourteen and in Final, the last year of primary school. After that, Ashari students who want to continue their education sit for the citywide Secondary School Examination. Only the four days of the weekend remain between now and the test on Firstday. The exam is the same for kasiri and halani, though kasir students have the extra subject of magic. Virtually all kasiri take the SSE, while in the poorest halan districts, almost nobody goes on to secondary school. Horiel falls somewhere in between; about half our Final classmates registered for the exam.

There was never any question at home of whether or not I'd take the SSE. I don't want to settle for a primary education, and I know Mother expects more.

“You're awfully quiet,” Leah says. “Are you anxious? It's not like you need to worry about the SSE.”

I smile feebly. “It's not that.”

I tell her about the arrest at the Ikhad. She listens, twirling the end of her braid around her fingers. When I reach the death of the woman who was protecting the young man, Leah makes a small noise in her throat and rests her chin on Ari's head. I close my eyes briefly, trying to block out the image of the woman crumpling under the kasir's spell. I finish with my extraordinary encounter with Sarah.

When I stop talking, Leah scoots her chair closer to mine and takes my hand. I squeeze hers in silent thanks.

“I wonder what they thought that man had done,” she murmurs.

“Who knows?” The last time I heard about the Corps arresting someone, it was for distributing dissident writings: pamphlets condemning the segregated education system, leaflets counting up factory workers' grievances, and the like. But the young man at the Ikhad could've been suspected of any number of things.

“It's getting bad, isn't it?” Leah says. “Things are so tense.”

I nod. Earlier this fall, the workers at an auto factory staged a demonstration to protest the replacement of a supervisor with a kasir rather than a halan promoted from their ranks. The police broke up the gathering with spells, then smashed up a nearby halan bookshop, claiming its owner carried banned books on foreign revolutions that had given the workers ideas. With jobs getting scarcer for halani and the Assembly so quick to use magic against anyone who kicks up a fuss, there's only going to be more trouble.

But something more immediate is bothering me. “Leah,” I say, “I had one of those feelings when I saw the young man.”

“You mean the intuition?” she says, suddenly sounding reluctant. “Marah, you need to stop obsessing—”

“It came too late!” I burst out, rising from my chair. “By the time I knew something bad was going to happen, I couldn't stop it. It was like when—”

“This has nothing to do with your father,” Leah cuts in. “It's no use thinking that way.”

The very first time the intuition stirred in me was the day my father died, and this morning is beginning to feel like an ugly echo of that day.

“Then what's the point?” I ask. Unlike the kasiri, who can cast spells at will, we halani have no control over when we get these premonitions.

“I don't know,” Leah says. “Please, Marah, sit.”

“‘Heed the intuition,' the saying goes, right? People say it can guide you, help you make the right choice or do what's wise. But what about when you can't?”

“But you
did
do what was wise,” my friend says, grabbing Ari's hand before he knocks her history notebook off the table. “You got out of the Ikhad in time. Without the intuition, you might've been hurt.”

I sink back into my chair, deflated. “Maybe you're right.”

“The important thing,” Leah says firmly, “is that you're safe.”

• • •

A
T
HOME
, I
find Caleb in our bedroom, poring over the yellowed pages of a book. Our room is small, much of it taken up by the bed against one wall and the pine dresser against the other. If we didn't store the extra mattress under the bed, we'd hardly have any floor space at all. There's a cast-iron radiator under the window, which looks out on the street. Next to the radiator are my violin case and the bookshelf Father nailed together for us out of cast-off boards when we were little.

My ten-year-old brother lies sprawled on top of the blue-and-white quilt that was Mother's when she was a girl. He's reading the folktale collection, the first book Tsipporah gave me. He holds it in both hands, his bony wrists poking out of the sleeves of his cotton shirt. His gray wool sweater, handed down from me, lies in a heap on the floor.

I scoop up the sweater and sink onto the quilt beside him. He looks up at me hopefully, his silky dark brown hair falling over his eyebrows. I hand him the new book from Tsipporah's stall, and he begins to leaf through it.

Caleb doesn't speak. When he was three years old, he came down with meningitis and almost died. I remember hovering in our bedroom doorway, my throat tight, watching my brother twist and whimper while Mother tried to cool his fever with a wet cloth. Caleb survived, but as he recovered, Mother and Father and I noticed he no longer turned his head when we called his name. He also all but stopped talking. The illness had left him deaf.

We didn't know any other deaf people, and the only school for deaf children was for kasiri. Forced to figure things out on our own, we devised a system of signs to communicate. Before Caleb's illness, we had been teaching him to read. He had even started to sound out words. But after he lost his hearing, he would only stare silently at the letters on the page. I kept reading him picture books anyway, signing the stories as best I could. Caleb's favorite was about a boy who outwitted a bear in the forest. We always imagined the forest in the story to be the same one that loomed to the west of the city.

One day, I caught my brother examining one of my schoolbooks, a literature text with no illustrations. Somehow, he was reading. From then on, he devoured every book he could get his hands on.

I slide back on the bed and lean against the wall. Caleb curls up against me, propping the folktale collection on his knees.

I tap his shoulder.
Is Mother home?
I sign.

He nods.
She's working
.

I wince. It's going to be one of those weekends when she hardly leaves her study. This is the third time this fall.

Mother works at the Horiel District Hall, one of the neighborhood outposts of the Assembly's bureaucracy. The seven councilors oversee a labyrinthine administration of government officials, all of whom are kasiri, of course. But each District Hall relies on a staff of halan clerks to handle the most tedious tasks, which must be completed over the weekend if they aren't done by Sixthday evening.

She didn't come out all morning
, Caleb signs,
so I made the chicken stock. And I swept the apartment
.

Now that he mentions it, the bedroom floor does look shinier.
My thanks. I'm going to study for a bit
.

• • •

I
SPEND
THE
afternoon at the kitchen table trying to memorize mathematical formulas and the names of all the First Councilors of the Assembly in chronological order. Every few minutes, I catch myself staring off into space. I can't stop thinking about the woman the police killed. Did she have children? What made her step between the Corps officers and the young halan?

Could I have prevented her death?

And then it's that fateful day again, six years ago. I try to brush away the memory as I usually do because Leah's right, it's no use dwelling on it, but after what happened today, it's impossible.

It was an ordinary weekday morning. I sat eating breakfast in this very spot while Mother, who didn't work then, cut a fried egg into small pieces for Caleb. Father clomped into the kitchen in his work boots, a merry smile crinkling his eyes. He bent to kiss Mother on the cheek and patted Caleb on the head. Then he gave my braid an affectionate tug and walked out the door, off to the steelworks.

At school later, in the middle of mathematics class, I started to feel anxious. I kept picturing Father leaving through our apartment door. A terrible foreboding crept over me: something bad was going to happen to him. I told myself it was my imagination, but I couldn't shake my dread. At morning recess, Leah asked if I was sick. When I explained, her eyes grew big.

“The intuition!” she whispered.

Certainty flooded through me. I'd never had the intuition before, but I'd been told about it. Suddenly I was terrified. I didn't know where Father's steelworks was, but I had to do something.

“I'm going home,” I said. “Mother will know what to do.”

I ran home as fast as I could and burst in on Mother and Caleb rolling out piecrust in the kitchen.

“Marah, why aren't you at school?” Mother exclaimed.

“Something's going to happen to Father,” I cried. “You have to bring him home!”

“What?” she said.

“Mother, I
know
it.”

I saw the fear in her eyes then.

As soon as she had found a neighbor to watch Caleb, she left for the steelworks, and I followed. I had to run to keep up with her, my heart thumping against my lungs. By the time we finally crossed the Davgir into the industrial zone on the other side of the river, I was ready to collapse.

I followed Mother to the end of a wide road. Dozens of workers were gathered there, with more joining them every minute. In the distance stood the steel mill. Smoke was pouring from one of its towers. My breath caught in my throat.

The men stopped Mother as she tried to pass. “There's been an accident, an explosion,” one of them said. “It's not safe.”

“My husband,” she said. “Avshalom Levi. He's the blast furnace foreman . . .” She craned her neck, searching the growing crowd for Father.

Some of the workers exchanged glances. A man with an eye patch said halfheartedly, “He's not with us, but we're not all out yet . . .”

The men waited. Mother waited with them. I held Mother's hand.

Finally, the supervisor arrived, shaking his head. His hollow cheeks were dark with stubble, his clothes streaked black. They'd lost three men in the accident. When he said the name Levi, everything went blurry, as though I was seeing the world through rippled glass.

I was home again, and Mother was rocking me in her arms. I felt numb. Night fell. In the dark I started screaming that I'd known, that I'd felt the danger. Mother held me all night and kept repeating to me, fiercely, “It's not your fault, Marah. There was nothing you could have done.”

But neither of us knew that for sure. That night, I took my grief and guilt and rage and began to wrestle with the intuition and its cruelty. And since then I've never stopped.

• • •

A
T
NIGHTFALL
, I
rummage through the kitchen drawer for matches and light the gas ceiling lamp over the table. Then I light the stove to reheat the chicken stock Caleb made and chop carrots and leeks for a soup. Drawn by the smells, my brother wanders into the kitchen and sticks his face into the steam swirling from the pot.

I raise my eyebrows in a silent question as I bring the knife and cutting board to the sink.

Needs more seasoning
, he signs, opening the pantry to survey the jars of dried herbs.

I shrug. On culinary matters, I defer to Caleb's judgment.

Just then, Mother walks into the kitchen. She's wearing an old skirt, and her long braid is down, not coiled up as it would be to go to work. Her tired eyes soften with tenderness as she watches us cooking together, but her fingers pick at a tear near the cuff of her cream-colored shirt.

When the soup is ready, I close the gas valve and ladle up a bowl for each of us. We slurp our meal in silence, content simply to be together. When Mother finishes her soup, she riffles through my notes piled at the empty place.

“It is possible to study too hard,” she says.

“I'm not,” I say. “I worked at Tsipporah's stall all morning, and then I went to Leah's. And I only have three days left.”