Thirst (20 page)

Late every afternoon a line of disturbed air in the distance runs parallel to the column’s march. Dust devils dance against the haze. What first appears to be a black claw scraping at the edge of the earth resolves into a small fleet of all-terrain vehicles. Before night has completely obscured the desert, a settlement of tents and vans has sprouted around us, populated by relief workers. They are handsome men and women with large, white teeth. Unfortunately, they’re often in much worse health than we are, afflicted by mosquito bites, sunburn, frostbite, diarrhea, and dehydration. We offer them our traditional remedies. When we wake at morning twilight they’re gone, only to reappear at our next stop. Or perhaps they’re not the same relief workers: we never recognize individual doctors or nurses.

Within the column itself we are without advanced medicine, not even aspirin, nor gauze for bandages, nor syringes; whatever the relief workers leave is stolen or misplaced. Beyond our sight, traveling parallel to our column and the aid mission, is a kind of mobile village founded by merchants who sell the stolen relief supplies to the indigenous population and the local authorities. Hospitals and clinics in the countries through which we pass momentarily prosper, and life expectancy figures surge. They subside after we move on.

It’s said that the financial capital generated by the sale of these relief supplies has established
another
traveling village several kilometers further beyond the horizon. This village caters to the personal needs of the relief
workers and the merchants in the first village, with restaurants, an appliance store, and a drugstore. This is only a rumor: all we know of the countries through which we pass is the sand directly beneath our feet. Other rumors suggest additional, more elaborate commercial centers tracing even more distant paths through the desert.

Some of us have bedrolls and mess kits, others nothing more than the shirts, trousers, and running shoes that we were wearing when we left home. Some walk barefoot, the skin of our feet as tough and brittle as bark. At night we repair our clothes, using for material empty sacks stamped
Red Cross
and
UNHCR.
By campfires up and down the column we hear prophecies of our destination: its green fields, its trout-filled streams, its gleaming cities. The place does not have a name, or if it does our seers are afraid to pronounce it. Naming the place would limit it to a point on a map that not a single one of us possesses. It would make the place merely a finite number of square kilometers, with a finite history and a finite future. To name our destination would turn our shamans into politicians.

The ground is hard and the nights are cold, yet our sleep is always restful. Once the relief workers have left and the campfires have burned down, the column is quiet. A few infants cry out, but they are quickly comforted. An elder snores; another’s bones dully clatter as he stumbles down death’s staircase. We reach out to each other to make love. The stars whirl above us.

On another day a rumor, or a story, or a tale, or a song, passes along the column:

The rumor is this: another column of refugees, from another country and of another race, is also traveling through the desert, in a direction that may bring it into collision with our column. Some of us predict war and we take from our packs any implements that could be employed as weapons: spoons, sewing needles, sharpened keys to abandoned automobiles. Our would-be defenders are derided: what do we possess to fight over? Nevertheless, the possibility of another people like us has disturbed even the pacifists: the one thing we thought we possessed was our
uniqueness.
We believed that we held claim to the sum of the world’s sympathy; that we were paragons of misery; that ages hence poets would employ our travails as a metaphor for all kinds of alienation and displacement. It is unbearable to consider now that there may be another people, in equal or even greater distress, with whom we must share our symbolism.

This rumor is soon countered by another: Indeed, we are the only refugees remaining in the world. Everyone else has reached their homes. The world refugee problem
has been completely solved by the same kind of practical science and political determination that eradicated the smallpox virus. We are merely the exception or, like the smallpox germs that are kept frozen in a laboratory vault, we are the remnants of an epidemic being preserved for future study. The world will keep us homeless, if only to remind itself that there were once refugees.

And then there’s yet another rumor: no, there
are
other columns of refugees, thousands of columns, everyone is a refugee. We are all lost, no one has a home—certainly not the exhausted relief workers nor their superiors in Geneva and New York, who fretfully track our passage on satellite photographs. The passengers riding the vapor trails above us will change planes disoriented and hungry, unsure whether the gray dusk outside the terminal belongs to the morning or evening star.

For weeks we sing of the approach of the other refugees. The songs become more precise in their definition of the others, as if we are molding them from our own music. We dream of the others: sometimes they are as beautiful as children, clad in robes of silk. Other times we wake in fear, chilled by the night. In the day our pace quickens, even though we’re unsure whether we’re hurrying toward comradeship or battle. And then one morning the other column appears perpendicular to our line of march, coming directly at us. Head on, it’s impossible to gauge its size or distance. We stop and face them, our legs as heavy as stone, and the morning stretches into evening dusk as the two columns tremble before each other.

And then they arrive in a frenzied rush and we
realize, as we raise our hands in wary greeting, that this is the head of our own column, which has somehow circled back to cross the column’s center. There is chaos for a quarter of an hour and then the renewal of old friendships, reconciliation, and great song making that lasts well into the night. By dawn the column has reorganized itself and resumed its course.

We hardly recall the place from which we came; all our songs refer instead to the place to which we are going. It is for this reason, and because we had been looking the other way when we departed, that none of us recognize the approach to our own country. Now we cross the river that we once called Mother and file into the valley named Heart and pass along the outskirts of the capital city that was once the vessel of our young people’s ambitions. We know we’re here. No one says,
this is home,
but our songs are replaced by a steady, wordless susurrus.

As we pass through villages and fields, the country’s inhabitants halt their work. They don’t speak, but merely stand by the side of the road, leaning against their farming equipment. Their faces are hard and their pitchforks look deadly. We file along, careful not to jostle each other out of the column. Some of us believe we recognize our former homes, but the recognition is as faint as the illusion of déjà vu. People come to the windows and stand in doorways, and we think we see our nephews and sisters-in-law, but we’re not entirely sure. They offer us nothing in their slate gray eyes. It is as if they don’t see the column at all.

And now we’re not sure we have really recognized
either them or this country. These street names are unfamiliar; this country’s climate is drier than we thought the climate had been at home; its music relies more heavily on electrically amplified string instruments; its macaroni dishes are undercooked; its children’s tales revolve around a small, cunning pig, rather than the small, cunning rabbit with whom our children slide into sleep; we don’t understand these people’s jokes or their football strategies; they make love in postures we would find either uncomfortable or repellent; the billboards on the side of the highways are not in our own language, which has in the years of exile taken on the rhythms of the march and the grammar of the desert. In any event, tomorrow we will be somewhere else.

Versions of these stories first appeared in the following publications:

 

“Notice,” “Bouquet,” “Invisible Malls,” and “A Line Is a Series of Points” in the

 

“Thirst,” “The Joy and Melancholy Baseball Trivia Quiz,” and “No Grace on the Road” in the

 

“Cats in Space” in the

 

“The Republic of St. Mark, 1849” in the

 

“Night and Day You Are the One” in

 

“Among the Bulgarians” in the
Literary Review.

 

“Suit” in the

 

“The Weather in New York” in

Ken Kalfus is the author of two novels,
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,
which was a National Book Award finalist, and
The Commissariat of Enlightenment.
In addition to
Thirst,
which won the Salon Book Award, he is also the author of
Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies,
a
Times
Notable Book that was also a finalist for the PEN/ Faulkner Award. The title story won a Pushcart Prize and was adapted as a film for HBO.

 

Kalfus is a recipient of the Guggenheim and Pew fellowships, and lives in Philadelphia with his family. He can be found on the Web at
www.kenkalfus.com
.

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Visigoth
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Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies
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Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from Anonymous; Emilie and Henry Buchwald; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Dougherty Family Foundation; the Ecolab Foundation; the General Mills Foundation; the Claire Giannini Fund; John and Joanne Gordon; William and Jeanne Grandy; the Jerome Foundation; Constance and Daniel Kunin; the Lerner Foundation; Sanders and Tasha Marvin; the McKnight Foundation; Mid-Continent Engineering; the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; Kelly Morrison and John Willoughby; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Navarre Corporation; Ann and Doug Ness; Ellen Sturgis; the Target Foundation; the James R. Thorpe Foundation; the Travelers Foundation; Moira and John Turner; Joanne and Phil Von Blon; Kathleen and Bill Wanner; and the W. M. Foundation.

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

© 1998, Text by Ken Kalfus

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. (800) 520-6455
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition as follows: