The Narrow Land

The Bringer of War

1

AT THE TOP of the terminal steps the boy stops short and the woman pulling him along pulls harder. The boy resists, this time bending at the knee and pressing his weight down into his heels. The woman waits a second and then spins around.

'What? What is it now? What now?'

As she turns, her basket swipes the side of the boy's bare leg. A long red scratch springs out on his skin. The leg flinches, but the boy doesn't make a sound. He looks at the leg, he looks at the basket then he looks at her. He leans to the side and allows his suitcase to slip out of his hand.

'I'm not going.' he begins.

'You're not going? What do you mean you're not going?'

'I don't like-'

'You don't like? What, now, don't you like?'

This is not the first time they've stood in this place having this argument. The last time was two summers ago, the summer of 1948, when she'd turned her back on him to go buy the tickets and he bolted, leaving the shiny brown suitcase Harry had bought him sitting there in the middle of Grand Central. He didn't get very far then. He hadn't got the sense to try for an exit and was still too scared of elevators and escalators and anything, in fact, that moved him towards something he didn't already know or couldn't already see. And so he just plunged into the crowd and began scooting from side to side. It took no time at all between her reporting the matter and the cop dragging him back to where she'd been waiting, under the clock with four faces.

'You the mother?' the cop had asked.

And she'd nodded yes, because she just couldn't bring herself to go into the whole sorry story, and to have to do it too against a blubber of tears.

She had shown her temper back then, smacking the boy on the side of his head - the first and only time she had ever done that. And then shredding the tickets in her hands and flinging the lot in his face, she had yelled, 'Happy now? Happy?' with the cop still standing there listening to her. 'Is that what you want? I take a whole day off work just to go with you on a train to Boston. A whole day, just to come all the way back on my own, and this is how you treat me. Well, you can go boil for the rest of the summer in the apartment, go boil like a piece of meat in a pot - you hear me now? You can just go.'

The boy didn't budge. He never even raised his hand to comfort his slapped ear. A slight sulk on his face was all: no shame, no regret, nothing to show any real upset. Just stood there, peering straight through her, like he was trying to figure out what colour wallpaper was inside her head.

And here they are again, two years gone by and the boy now ten years old, so far as anybody knows. The case Harry bought him is back on duty, a little more faded and a lot more scuffed after two years of getting dragged in and out from under his bed, where it had been acting as a secret container for his comic books and bits of paper and God knows what other peculiarities he kept hidden in there.

This time, she is taking no chances. The ticket was bought during yesterday's lunchbreak and a porter Harry knows on the New Haven line has promised to keep lookout in case the boy gets any ideas about jumping off at the next station. It has all been arranged. She will put him on the train, take note of the car number and, when she sees the train pull out of the station, go call Harry in work who, in turn, will call Mrs Kaplan to let her know there have been no complications. When the train pulls into Boston, Mrs Kaplan will board it and they will continue together on to the Cape. After the train, there will be one of those chubby buses, after that an automobile. And then the sea, the sand and Mrs Kaplan's grandson named Richie.

She is tired of telling all this to the boy: the bus, the automobile, the sea, the sand, the grandson named Richie. A dog even! Tired building it all up while the boy, in his silence, pulls it right back down again.

But he promised Harry; he swore it - this time there would be no monkey business. He had seemed sincere in his promise too. Harry even made a few jokes about him running off last time and having to be brought back by a cop. He said it had been on the radio news - the whole of New York had heard about it. The boy sort of grinned when Harry said that, a nice-looking boy, too, when he bothers to smile. The past two years have made such a difference to him: better at school, better at eye contact and, when you can get him to talk, he speaks like any other American boy, practically. He takes more of an interest, too, and she'd been so long telling him, 'Sweetheart, you got to take more of an interest in life.'

She has every confidence that this time he will act like a big boy. She said so a few days ago to Harry who, through the mirror, had cocked one eye at her over his foamed-up face. Every confidence.

She lays the basket down next to the suitcase. 'I asked you a question,' she says.

The boy ignores her.

'What's the matter with you - answer me, please?'

But the boy still refuses to say a word. And so she starts on him. She starts off slow and steady but soon she is letting him have it in shovelfuls. She lets him have it for all the trouble he's been these past two summers when she's had to pay, yes, pay, a sitter so she can go out to work while he mopes around the apartment cutting dumb little paper figures out of magazines and playing those dumb little games that he plays with them. She lets him have it over Mrs Kaplan - Mrs Kaplan who has been so kind as to allow him another chance after all the inconvenience two years before. Mrs Kaplan of all people. The woman without whom he would be God knows where, dead at the side of a road in the middle of Europe somewhere. Mrs Kaplan, the woman who had probably put the whole idea in President Truman's head in the first place about saving all those orphans. Anything that comes to mind, she throws at him: his stealing food from the kitchen as if she never feeds him or would refuse him a bite to eat! His wandering around the building in the middle of the night, spooking the neighbours! And as for all those lies that come pouring out of his mouth. Senseless lies! To his teachers; his classmates; the man in the grocery store - to any ear with a hole in it that is willing to listen.

She wants to stop. To pause, anyhow, and think about this barrage of words. But just like it happens sometimes in the typing pool, the words seem to shoot out of their own accord except now they're landing on the boy instead of on the page. And NO, she continues, she won't be tearing up the ticket like before, if that's what he's hoping. He will get on that train and she will go back to work. He will get on that train and do as she says and she will be standing on the platform until she sees the train disappear down, right down, the track.

'I don't like.' he says and then, 'I don't want.'

'And I don't care! You hear me? I don't care what you like or don't like, what you want or don't want. You understand? I've had enough of all your likes and your dislikes. of your- wants and your don't-wants. And you know what else? I'm tired. Tired because you kept me awake all night, in and out of the bathroom, light on, light off in the hallway. I'm tired and-'

The boy lowers his head, then swallows. 'Please, Frau Aunt,' he finally says.

She turns away from him. On the concourse below, she watches the crowd dissolve into one big moving mass with umbrellas, hats, purses, suitcases tacked onto it. For the first time, she notices how many soldiers and marines are moving around down there. It's as if the war in Europe is still on. Yet the servicemen seem different somehow, younger and more perked up than before. She remembers then: they've moved on to a new war now, and what she's looking at here is a whole batch of brand new men. She puts her hand in the pocket of her raincoat and pulls out a handkerchief, blows her nose and puts the handkerchief back in. She lifts her face and looks up to the vaulted ceiling and the arched windows beneath it that have taken the rainy, grey daylight and turned it to silver. It makes her think of a church from her childhood. A church she can no longer name where a once familiar service was going on over her head, and at eye level, the elbow of a father on one side and on the other the elbow of a mother. She feels ashamed of herself then for yelling at the boy, for sending him away when he doesn't want to go. For bringing all that up about his private little world, the games that he plays when he goes there. He is, after all, still a child, and as Harry often says, 'God knows what that kid's seen in his time.'

She comes back to the boy, softened. 'Look,' she begins, 'you're a good boy. I know that. But it's been tough, you know? And not just for you but for me too. I try. I do try. But now you need to have time away. Time for you. Time for me - you understand? We'll get along better that way when you get back. A new start we'll have then. New home, new school, new. well, a whole new life, you could say.'

'But I won't know where the apartment is....