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Thirst
BY KEN KALFUS FICTION MILKWEED EDITIONS 205 PAGES No Grace on the Road The peasant couple first thought we were doctors. Their infant son was ill. His grandfather had been sent by bicycle the day before to the nearest telephone, which was in the post office at Pat'in, about ten strenuous kilometers north, in order to summon an army physician from Sempril. At the time of our arrival, in the midst of a storm that left us at their door gasping for air, the family was engaged in a tense and solemn vigil. It was with great difficulty that I made them understand that neither of us was a doctor. I did not even try to explain that I was an economist. There is no word for economist indigenous to our language. In the capital we usually employed the French cognate, though the government of the day had officially replaced it with a newly coined one derived from the native expression "he who tallies cattle." It was an especially inappropriate term for use in a country whose dairy industry had declined to the position where it could no longer supply milk even to that part of the population that was under five years of age. "Can you not do something?" the child's father asked. "I just told you. I'm not a doctor." "I do not understand," he said, perhaps accusingly, as if he were claiming that my slight, persistent accent somehow made me unintelligible. "Our jeep broke down. It's about a kilometer down the road," I told him again. I wanted to step away from the infant's pallet: I was unsure of the age at which children began to understand speech. "We're traveling to the capital from Queling." "The army sent you from Queling?" "The army didn't send us. I'm on leave." The man stared at me. He still didn't believe that we had not come in response to the grandfather's summons. "But what were you doing at Queling?" Annoyed at his thickheadedness and his impertinence, I assumed a military posture, looking just a little bit past him, and identified myself: I was a reserve officer, Sublieutenant Palin Ni Lap, under the direct command of Major General Ti of the Third Patriotic Division. I pronounced each word carefully, sure that at least one would make an impression on the couple. But none did. They turned and, still seeking a doctor, looked to the completely alien figure warming itself by the small peat fire. I explained: "This is my wife Leslie. She is from Westchester, U.S.A." Hearing her name spoken, my wife offered the couple a smile that, although diminished in recognition of the child's condition, nevertheless consisted of more teeth than could be counted among the peasants' communal property. She was sitting on an old Coca-Cola crate partitioned to hold deposit bottles, a relic from the days when empties were shipped to a bottling plant outside Bangkok, making a small profit for our fledgling trucking industry and producing a certain amount of revenue for our Roads and Customs Department. Indeed, empty Coke bottles were once a major export item. Now no-deposit cans lay spent meters from the spot where they had given up the last of their juices. Our trucking industry was moribund, all but the most marginal concerns bought up by Indian entrepreneurs who had the capital, the contracts, and the volume to operate them competitively. Of course, the officials of the Coca-Cola Company eluded reproach; in fact, they could point out that some of the savings of using cans had been passed on to the consumer, making the soft drink available to a greater number of my countrymen than ever before. It was just something that came to mind whenever I saw an empty Coca-Cola crate. The Hotel Progress in the capital used two of them, installed behind the check-in counter, to hold guests' post and keys. Three small children stood across from my wife, absolutely transfixed by the extravagant curls of her light brown hair. Sitting on a makeshift couch, an elderly woman, an amorphous mass of distended skin, stared at her, turned away, cackled obscenely, and turned back to stare. The peasant glanced at his young wife, trying to gauge how well she understood the gravity of the situation. Her head was bowed. "You are from the capital?" "Yes." This had an even greater effect on him than the fact that Leslie was an American or that my family's name was one of the most famous in the country. My grandfather had owned the largest plantation in the adjacent province. My uncle was the publisher of the country's single daily newspaper (though the government was technically its sole owner, in trust for the people, only eighteen percent of whom were literate). My father, a former deputy ambassador to the United Nations, was now Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. But what mattered to the peasant was that I was from the capital, a city. "This is our certified residence," he stammered. "Fine." "I have my papers." He took a painful step toward his wife, revealing that he was partially disabled. The fronts of his torn cloth shoes stared at each other. His back arched to the right of his hips. Such misfortune was not unusual in my country; if it was not the legacy of childhood rickets, then it was the outcome of a losing confrontation with some sort of imported machine. For a non-industrial nation, we suffered a good many industrial accidents. There wasn't a collective farm in the country that hadn't made an offering of at least two limbs to its combine. "We don't want your papers. We ask only for a place to spend the night." "Get them," the peasant told his wife. "I told you. I don't need to see anything." A sudden fit of strangled cries coming from the object on the pallet interrupted us. "That child sounds awful," Leslie said in English. The children gasped, surprised that she could speak. Of course, she was completely unintelligible to them, but her voluptuous voice, plumped and edged by her native region, nasaled just enough to identify the suburb with the city that gave it any meaning at all, was as strange and wonderful as her curls, and as eerie as the cries of the sick child. "They know it," I replied. The peasant repeated his order to his wife, discomfited that words secret to him were being exchanged in his home. She did as she was told and also removed a bundle of rags from a large carton. "Dry yourself and change into these," she said to Leslie and pointed to a screen at the other end of the room. Leslie knew only a few phrases of my obscure native language, and she knew them rather badly. Nevertheless, she spoke the language better than all but perhaps thirty other Westerners in the world, and she understood the woman's invitation. She ducked behind the screen, which in fact was a genuine, if somewhat battered, home movie screen salvaged from God knows what dump, mounted on a low tripod as if the peasants intended to show us slides from their vacation on the Cote d'Azur as soon as electrification reached this part of the province. No one offered me a change of clothes, nor did I expect any. I resigned myself to examining the family's official documents, which were bound by an old and frayed length of, what? Dental floss? This dilapidated shed was indeed their certified residence. They had each been born in this district. He was twenty-four and she was twenty-two. Krik and Sana. He had served nearly two years in the army, but only in the "reconstruction corps" of conscript workers, and had probably not left the province once in his life. His injury was recent: he owned an "heroic sacrifice" early discharge. The old hag, age forty-six, was Sana's mother. The couple had four children ranging in age from five months to seven years. Miraculously, everyone was properly vaccinated or, almost as miraculously, given their poverty, immobility, and unsophistication, they had managed to get their vaccination papers forged. And although I had never met this family before, there was certain, even more intimate information about it in my possession. I knew its annual income, its average daily intake of protein and carbohydrates, and its members' life expectancies. In air-conditioned offices in New York, Paris, and Geneva, these profound truths were objects of commerce. I returned the papers without comment and performed the intricate ritual of asking for shelter, and Krik went through the intricate ritual of agreeing to provide it. My military rank alone would have obliged his cooperation, as would have my social position and, of course, my gun, but this formal ceremony -- whose florid excesses would have appalled Leslie had she understood what we were saying -- provided a means of expressing dire need and mandatory hospitality without awkwardness, unmanly deference, or ambiguity. For me to rend my people's language into English literally would be to indeed rend it; it would make the language appear ludicrous, its forms affectatious and its syntax convoluted, when in fact it is a mode of expression perfectly suited to its environment -- this dense jungle, this poverty, and this climate of extremes. That it has no natural way of saying "carburetor" or "nose job" does not dim its brilliance any more than the lack of a word that adequately describes the storm from which we had just escaped qualifies English's. Sana meekly went to another darkened corner of the room and prepared dinner, joined by her worried husband. Still wet, I approached the feeble fire. The old woman turned away and the kids gathered around their sick brother. It was nearly incomprehensible to me that a family could live in such squalor. What was shocking was not so much that the place was suffocatingly small -- I knew three graduate students who paid $900 a month to share a studio that size on East 70th Street -- but that it was in such extravagant disrepair. The plasterboard walls were near collapse and the floor was slimy with some sort of mold. The only ventilation was through a makeshift fireplace whose chimney was constructed from a flimsy metal sluice. The monsoon dripped in, never, it seemed, from the same leak twice. The hut was furnished at random. The backseat of an automobile served as the hag's throne. An oil drum hung loosely over a water basin. The wall decorations consisted of a cheap tapestry and a three-color print of an octagonal animist symbol representing the "eight fields of life." Serving as a hearth rug was a piece of thermal insulation. The oldest daughter set dishes on a wooden table whose base had once been encircled by high-tension cables. Our boots were dripping on a lurid green piece of material that may have been a swatch of Astroturf. "Here I am," Leslie suddenly announced, emerging from behind the screen. We were startled. For a moment I did not recognize her and her Caucasian body in the peasant's drab costume. And then it was as if she were naked, every arc in her torso accentuated in the wraparound in a way no native woman's planar, boyish body ever could be. I could see her nipples erupting beneath the sackcloth. Intuitively, she had known how to fasten the garment, thereby heightening the parody. My discomfort was extreme. In the eyes of these people, she was godless, parading her body about like some slut from Broadway or Pigale or our capital's own Rue des Chretiens. I sternly glanced at the peasant, but his eyes were already cast to the floor. Leslie, her gross (actually an 8B) feet bare except for scarlet nail polish that shone with more power than the kerosene lamp that illuminated the room, hunkered next to the sick child and tickled his belly. "Hello, hello there you," Leslie whispered. The child, his eyes glassy, his breathing labored, offered no response.
Leslie looked at me and lifted a strand of her hair. Absently, she said, "This weather gives me the frizzies."
Ken Kalfus is an American writer who has lived in Paris, Dublin, Ireland and Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since 1994, he has made his home in Moscow with his wife, Inga, and their daughter, Sky. "Thirst" is his first collection of fiction. Milkweed Editions. © 1998 by Ken Kalfus. Excerpted by permission from Milkweed Editions.
"Thirst":
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