I wake in the night and know they’re coming to get me. Something had slammed, door’s been crowbarred open, Sara asleep next to me, brutes filing in. They’ll be in the bedroom in a moment and do what they will. A corridor separates us, two doorways at each end, one closed, the other forced open. Not much of a fortress, I think, not much time to get up and try to grab something to put up a fight. We are good as dead. I have so much yet to do that I thought I would have done by now. A young couple, slaughtered in their bed. I could see the headline. Even as I think this I remain inert.
But it’s not our door they’ve broken down, I realize, it’s the upstairs neighbor’s. It sounds like a scuffle up there and so now I know that it is the upstairs neighbor, whom I don’t know, who is getting murdered. A dispute over a payment, or maybe a girlfriend has changed hands. He is involved in shady traffic. I can even see him in my mind’s eye, the killer, big eyes full of blood, two fingers of forehead, dense, woodcut figure. There is no exchange of words. My neighbor utters a brief moan a moment into a burst of cumbersome steps, the two or three men wrestling in a furious dance, bungled steps, stifled speech, furniture is pushed, a fat bowl drops and does not shatter, just as the neighbor drops with the full impact of unconscious weight. His body is dragged across the floor. Silence. He is becoming something else, I think.
I rise out of bed as slowly and inconspicuously as I can and pass my hand over the tabletop looking for something sharp but all I manage to grab hold of is a pencil, so I crouch low on the rug by the bed waiting to see what comes next. I am caught in the night, unprepared and naked. I stop breathing, afraid Sara will wake up. The blackbird in the tree outside does not sing. Nothing but the thin tinnitus in my ears that I’ve lived with all these years.
The neighbor moans again and the assailant, perhaps surprised to find him conscious, lunges at him with fearsome rage and I hear the fatal blows come one upon another—One! Two! Three!
The crowbar drops, clatters to a metallic stall on the wooden planks of the floor. It pains me that I cannot see his face, just a vague mass with a bludgeoned head and a pool of blood. I barely breathe. I wait. It pains me that all I do is wait. I don’t even know who lives there.
The murderer moves, searching for spoils. I stay crouched with the pencil in my hand and wait and as I do I am nine again, in Bosnia, before the war, up in that mirabelle tree beyond the hump of levy right on the edge of the willow wood where you’d fled because you knew mom and dad had gone to a school thing and you had kept the results of some catastrophic math test to yourself and knew it would be now revealed, to ruin the lie that you were good at everything, and you crouched there on that branch and listened to the wood pigeon roosting above you and the murderer roosting above me now and the bird’s throaty coos and the howling dog of the mad loner who sold his greens in the market and lived in that fertile wilderness a hundred yards away. Months before, you’d gone with a pack of friends to the man’s property to steal watermelons, only to be discovered, lights flick, the loner comes out swearing, shotgun goes off once, surely at the stars, surely he is not mad enough to shoot at us, but we don’t know, and upstairs not a sound, and you, back then, running heart in mouth across the levy and into the light of your neighborhood, watermelonless. It was on a dirt path near here you saw those gypsies pass in their tattered, delirious clothes, their faces dark and maddened, a huge sad bear prancing in front on hind legs, chained, tasselled, encouraged darkly by the whip and the shrill clash of tambourine and the deep thump of the kick drum. A dark girl, dancing, edged over to you, sweet boy, and crowned you with a wreath made of wildflowers and you saw the gold in her teeth. On they went to that other life, enchanted, forever strange, the bear striding for his nightly rest. How dark the world appeared up in the barren mirabelle tree as you crouched there, waiting for the murderer to move now, upstairs. How alive it was in its cool unfathomed darkness in that tree. A slow breeze would sink your heart and you’d renew your grip on the branch, and my grip on the pencil now, thirty years later. The pigeon was alone as you were. For a while you weren’t sure that you would ever go back home. Maybe you could wander off and find the gypsies and maybe they would let you join them, or you could walk to the sea, sleep on some pebbled beach, travel on trains among sacks of flour, wait on the beach for the boat to sell you peaches and grapes, or take you across to Italy. But you had no money. Past midnight you sulked your way home, pouting at the door, and found your parents in their nightwear at the dining table, feigning calm. They tucked you in that night, said not a word about the miserable grade, said nothing about the flight, a conspiracy of silence for your peace of mind. In the morning, you went to the hospital to visit your grandmother who lay there dying, plugged to the dialysis, sinking into herself, looking almost boneless, mustering all her strength for that hint of smile and you crouching there just as I am crouching now thirty years later waiting for a sound upstairs, waiting for her words, which came slowly and with difficulty, You were so good, so good, and be good to your mother, she said. You think about the cloven night when you were twelve, when they took the town, mother saying Thank god grandmother didn’t live to see this, the soldiers coming to search for weapons, the neighbors who helped you, gave you shelter, the other neighbors who were killed by other neighbors, then weeks later, crouching in the doorway in that strange aunt’s house, air raid siren having howled, you hear the low whirr of airplane, and wait for the bomb to find you, father saying Don’t move, it’s best to be in the doorway, the house is thickest here, and you wait, and wait, and wait, just as you are waiting now thirty years later, but the bomb finds someone else every time, and then the refugee years, the contingency of each new day, the unbelievable pluck of your parents. And all this comes in no more than a minute, a whole life of crouching with bated breath. All this is always here, waiting to be called into being at the briefest squat.
“Come to bed,” she slurs through slumber.
“I think our neighbor just got killed.”
“What?”
“Shh.”
I hear sirens. They get louder, oh it really happened, someone called them, I almost believe, but the sound wanes, pans sideways, on its way to someone else’s tragedy.
The street door of the building opens below, four or five pairs of legs are climbing up, the police, they’d come without a siren, I think at first, but no, they are rowdy, addled, young, euphoric, they walk up past my door, push open the door of the upstairs neighbor, they will find him dead, I think, and the killer’s still up there, what is about to happen, but they don’t, they burst out laughing, they are ribbing him, he has fallen, he has puked, it was all him, all I’d heard.
“Get up off your ass,” they say. They raise him up, he is laughing weakly, music comes on, and the party continues at his place.
“Come,” she says.
I do.
“My strange, strange boy,” she mumbles even as she slips softly into sleep again and I stay awake, always here and there, borne on that vast river that goes homeward where everybody is still alive and everything that would be has not yet come to be.