Children of Paradise: A Novel Page 9

  Trina stands by the door and listens for footsteps. Rose and the rest of the children fall silent, almost listless in concentration. Each walks with Ryan in the darkness. Each squashes the belief that evil jungle spirits roam on such a night on the hunt for young hearts to tear from chests, and the most venomous snakes crawl up to the dormitories under the camouflage of darkness to catch the foot of a sleepwalking child and drag that child off into the jungle, and worst of all the dark scrambles the head of a child who becomes disoriented and walks toward the trees whose thick trunks and massive canopies and tangled undergrowth grab legs and wrap vines around the neck and pull a child’s body up into the trees, never to be seen again. Trina imagines she accompanies Ryan in that dark. She holds his hand, and they tiptoe in matching steps and press into the dark, which, despite its thickness, parts for them in the face of such conviction.

  As Ryan draws close to the bakery, his eyes grow accustomed to the night. He sees a post that resembles a sentry. The night air is like a veil draped over a shy face. The shy face retreats as Ryan approaches it, and the bakery smell thickens and he has to swallow the saliva that pools around his tongue. He feels brave, thinking of Trina and Rose and the others salivating and swallowing, just thinking of him getting nearer and nearer the hot loaves. The baking crew plucks the loaves from the giant oven with long paddles shoved under the baking trays, which they turn over with a swift tilt of the hands. The loaves are lined up in neat rows on shelves to cool beside open windows. Ryan reaches an open window and ducks under it. He hears adults talking inside the bakery not five yards from him. A dog barks a little distance away. A guard smokes, contrary to commune rules, at the same distance as that dog. A red light shines like a bright night insect and dulls and shines and dulls. Ryan reaches up and grabs the first hot solid thing he feels and does not bother to look at it in the dark. He wants to grab another but can barely breathe and control a gross tremor from head to toe. He tries to reach up again but cannot. His arms refuse to obey him. He tries to turn away, but his legs feel pegged to the ground.

  He conjures Trina and Rose waiting for him. He sees the bottom of the well with him in it and the cluster of sticks descending on his head. The fear proves sufficient to unlock his muscles. He crouches and tiptoes away. The barking gets closer. Ryan cannot look back. He speeds up his escape. The loaf burns his side where he clutches it. He hears more dogs barking and the clicking of crickets and a hoot he credits to an owl and a chattering of some sort that could be any wild animal. A strand touches his face. He swipes at it and thinks of a web and hopes it is the web of an absent spider. Heat from the hugged hot bread travels from his side up to his forehead and down to his toes. The air grows hot. The soil and the wood walkway burn his bare feet. He feels as if he is walking inside a giant oven heated by a close darkness. He cannot look back. He can barely see his hand in front of him. He counts, almost by touch, the rows of buildings full of sleeping children separated from their parents. The solid wood buildings, though spaced several feet apart, appear to be bridged by the dark. Ryan feels the dark gliding with him, its density creating the sensation that he was moving with the night rather than through it. At last he stops at his dormitory door. He turns the handle and slips inside and starts to breathe heavily. Everyone inside almost cheers at the sight of him with a loaf under his arm. He holds the block of gold high into the air.

  They surround him and clap him on the back. Trina and Rose hug him. Everyone looks at the loaf, not sure how to begin to address its baked perfection. The hot smell spins their heads. The tanned rectangle shines like a gold bar, a work of art with a heavenly scent. They look on and cannot believe what they must do next, and quite fast if they are not to arouse suspicion. Ryan reads their minds and breaks off a chunk of bread and offers it to Trina. She passes it to Rose.

  —Youngest first.

  Rose looks around and decides to keep the gift. She holds the portion up to her face and takes a long deep breath and holds it in and waits as if inhaling is the point and actually eating her share an afterthought. Ryan works his way along the group, going by age. He breaks the bread and hands a piece to each child in turn. At last he takes the remaining chunk for himself, and on Trina’s count to three, they begin to nibble and chew long and slow, turning the bread to liquid in their mouths before swallowing it and keeping this silent chewing circle of smiles and nods and amazement in their eyes. How can bread taste so sweet? It’s only yeast, flour, water, and a pinch of salt. Bread must be the number one food in heaven. They mop up crumbs and lick wet fingers. They speculate about the vital importance of bread. That’s why Catholics offer a wafer for the body of Christ. That’s why each morning it is bread that breaks the night’s fast. Bread should be a world currency like gold. The Bread Standard! To bread or not to breathe! They sniff the bread smell, still in the air. Bread for air. Air bread. Trina calls Ryan the bread liberator. Rose says he is her hero. And mine, another child adds. Mine, too, says a fourth and fifth. Trina teases Ryan, and he teases her back.

  —The Bread Liberator!

  —The Resurrected One!

  —Will you put the bread into verse?

  —Yes, something about myrrh and frankincense.

  The whispers die down and the children settle in their bunk beds with smiles. Trina asks Ryan in a whisper how he felt out there alone in the night. Ryan tells her and Rose about it.

  —The night’s so thick, you can chop it like it’s a tree. You can climb up into it as if you’re dreaming, like the dark is a ladder. You lie down in it and it feels heavy on you, like you’re at the bottom of a lake. You hold up your hand and you rest it against the giant body of the night and you can’t tell your hand from the dark flesh. It gets to you so much that if you move in the night, you begin to see you’re not the one moving but the night’s carrying you forward and you leave no trace behind and there’s no path in front for you to take, there’s just the night moving forward and pulling you with it.

  They pause and listen for the next person to say something. They slow and quiet. Trina interrupts the silence by wondering in a low whisper if the community, even the gorilla in its cage placed at the center of the compound for all to see, belongs here in the middle of nowhere, isolated like this. They can easily disappear without a sound, absorbed by the trees, with little or no trace. Trina tells them that her mother says everything at the commune is a test. Ryan waits for a moment in case Rose might wish to speak, but hearing nothing from her, he says that Father preaches much the same thing, that everything about their lives in this place is a preparation for life in the next. They say nothing for several seconds. Trina asks if they are still awake. Rose and Ryan whisper back that they are but only barely.

  Trina whispers that Ryan’s magic trick with the bread matches the kind of thing Anansi would do. Several voices chime in, not knowing what Trina means.

  —Anan-who?

  —Anansi!

  She explains that, in one of the captain’s many spider stories that he told her on his boat to pass the time, clever Anansi goes out and defies all the odds and defeats many foes and returns with plenty of food for his hungry children. Just like Ryan. Everyone agrees.

  Trina thinks about her mother but says nothing. She remembers Joyce telling her about being tested and about the next place waiting for them.

  —That place is paradise, free of worldly cares. Focus on passing the test rather than on the reasons for having to take it; understanding will come with time.

  Trina can barely keep her eyes open as her thoughts about her mother’s advice blur and fade: Work with a smile on your face no matter what’s on your mind and no matter how bad you feel.

  The alarm sounds at the bakery. Searchlights comb the compound. Guards begin their search of each dormitory. Before anything can be done, the door bursts open and torchlights illuminate faces. The guards sniff. The smell of fresh bread lingers in the air. The children rub their eyes and feign a slow posture of interrupted dreams. The guards check inside a
few mouths. Nothing, not a shred of evidence, not even a crumb to be seen anywhere. Just the persistent smell. More guards arrive and sniff the air. They see Trina. They ask if she knows anything about this. Trina shakes her head. The guards tell the children that the whole dormitory is in big trouble. That it is obvious from the evidence in the air that stolen bread was in here not so long ago. That they will all be punished and shamed. That not even the twice-born Little Miss Trina can save them from this one. The children squirm and twist in their beds and look around at the ceiling or directly down in front of them. The guards continue to lambaste them: They should think about the shame they will bring down on the heads of their parents in front of the whole community. Such shame never goes away. If anything, it grows with each passing day. Trina inhales and seems about to speak up. Ryan sees her and jumps up on his bed and says he took the bread and he just finished it, just that second, and all the others were sound asleep. He opens his mouth wide. The guards surround him, shine a torch in his mouth, and sniff. They are convinced by the smell but cannot see any actual pieces of bread. Nothing in the teeth or the crevices of his mouth. No stray crumbs. This puzzles them. Bread crumbles in children’s hands. The guards confer. With Trina in the room, she cannot be involved in this transgression. They agree Ryan is the sole greedy culprit. They grab him and, ordering everyone to stay in bed, march him out of the dormitory.

  EIGHT

  Morning arrives in patches of red light trembling on the trunks of trees. The night rolls back its giant black linoleum to reveal buildings, fences, meandering night watchmen, and the prone quest of wild boar, the odd jaguar, pigs in their pens, cows, sheep, chickens, and goats. Light sidles between leaves to end in broken-glass formations on the forest floor. Doors open and people stagger into the open, looking more asleep than awake. The tintinnabulation of aluminum buckets and iron pots and pans. Stoves cough up flames and coax pots to the boil. The children wash, big boys supervise the washing and dressing of younger boys, older girls instruct younger girls.

  They head to the breakfast hall, long tables and aluminum plates and cups and steel spoons and the orchestra of children handling these implements without a conductor, warming up and then launching into their meager breakfast score, some tea and a piece of bread (sometimes buttered) for the children, occasionally a shallow bowl of cereal with watered-down milk. Before morning school there are chores like washing up, making beds, picking up rubbish, emptying bins and emergency night pots, sweeping floors, big girls combing the hair of younger girls, women and men overseeing the whole enterprise with a harsh word or two for any child who moves too slowly or with too much talk or too sloppily, or whose knees and elbows need to be oiled or whose face should be washed again to remove the sleep crusted in the corners of the eyes or whose mouth is white with toothpaste not washed away properly, and hurry, hurry for school, for canteen, for time is not to be wasted among the godly, since time is precious and in this blessed life there is never enough of it to waste even one second, so move.

  Joyce tries to hang wet clothes on the clothesline with her sore left hand in a bandage. She keeps several clothespins in her mouth and throws an item of clothing over the line. She arranges the item with a few adjustments and pins it in place. Trina runs up to her and hugs her. Joyce pushes her daughter away and looks around in a panic. Seeing no one, she pulls her daughter back to her embrace and apologizes several times.

  —The guards took Ryan last night.

  —I heard. I’m sorry. They’ll use him as an example to test us. You must be strong.

  They look at each other for a moment and nod. They tell each other they are fine and that they love each other. Trina offers to help hang the wet clothes. Joyce asks Trina to hold up her hands and decides at a glance that she needs to wash before she handles clean clothes. Joyce asks her to fetch more clothespins; she is about to run out, and then where will she be? Trina heads to the laundry room, where a group of women and girls attend to a dozen or more washing machines while others hand-wash certain items that cannot be machine-washed. More clotheslines are strung about the yard behind the laundry room with the clothing at various stages of being sunned. A breeze passes through, and the clothes flap like flags, and as the breeze picks up strength, the sound of the clotheslines mimics clapping or people slapping their thighs.

  The clotheslines fall into four distinct groups: women, men, girls, and boys. No one owns anything, so the aim is to find something that fits. The different dormitories and houses apportion clothes in the sizes of the children and adults living in them. This simplifies finding a clean item only a little, since the enormous task remains for a child or adult to wear something that is not too tight or too baggy.

  The commune’s rules against vanity discourage complimentary remarks about a person’s appearance. The preacher maintains that the beauty that matters most happens to be within and not in any outward appearance. The exterior look should attend to good hygiene, and that is the end of it. For cleanliness, says Father, is next to . . . He trails off and waits for the collective answer. Trina’s mother makes sure her daughter understands what size dress she needs to find and to pay particular attention to her choice of underwear—it should be clean and free of holes before she steps into it—and never to wear clothes that stand out and invite covetous eyes. The mending crew operates in a room packed with sewing machines. They make new things and repair old ones, cut large items down, and patch elbows and knees with pieces cut from items too damaged to restore to decency. Ironing is kept to a minimum, for the commune leader and his cadre of assistants only, and for the others to welcome an important visitor, perhaps a politician or other government delegation, to the compound. Clean clothes can be found in a series of storehouses with large shelves built in to walls, some fitted with drawers. Each section has a label according to age group and a one-word description. For Trina, the area to hunt for clothing is the girls’ section and the six-to-ten age group; she has to hunt for underwear or dress or skirt or blouse (never the immodesty of trousers for the girls) in the drawers with those labels. A folding crew is responsible for keeping everything tidy, down to ensuring that fresh adhesive or tape holds those all-important labels in place.

  Trina and her mother end up on laundry duty together. Trina washes her hands at a bucket beside a water barrel not far away. She shakes the excess water from her hands in the warm morning air and finds a bucket full of clothespins, just inside the door of the laundry room, and grabs it. But the bucket is so heavy, she has to walk back to her mother by gripping the handle with two hands and carrying it between her legs. This keeps her legs wide apart. As she steps, she rocks her body from one side to the other with the bucket kept very still between her legs. Trina’s mother looks around and sees her daughter swaying toward her, laden down with pins in a bucket, and she has to hold her sore ribs and cover her mouth to stifle her laughter, since levity is not encouraged outside of sermons. Trina reaches her mother, who looks around to be sure they are not observed before she hugs and kisses her daughter several times in quick succession and tells her that she loves her in a rapid volley and, with the same lightning speed, resumes her task of hanging wet clothes.

  —Mom, can you help Ryan?

  —I don’t know if I dare say anything, much less do something.

  —We can’t just abandon him.

  The postman’s van enters the compound. The approaching engine grabs everyone’s attention. The postman drives into the main clearing that separates Adam’s cage from the preacher’s house. He stops his van at the front steps of the preacher’s house, and people doing chores in the vicinity of the main clearing glance surreptitiously at the vehicle. The two guards stationed at the preacher’s front door help the postman with his many sacks of mail for the commune. Trina’s mother looks without looking, as she calls it. She knows it is considered slovenly and wayward to stop work and watch anything that does not relate directly to the task in front of her.

  —Maybe you can help him.
<
br />   —Me?

  —Yes, Trina. You.

  —But how?

  Joyce whispers to Trina to keep her eyes on her work while she steals a glance or two in the direction of the mail van. The fact that so much mail arrives and none of it for anyone other than the preacher, including more than two hundred checks signed over to him by pensioners, makes everyone think of their homes and relatives who must be curious about them. Seeing the mail van induces a longing in Trina for another place more than for a father. She never knew her father, but she remembers another country. She misses the fact of never knowing her father less than she misses the country that she left to come to the jungle. A faraway land fathered her. Her mother never talks about him except to say he was a drinker and gambler and ungodly and unworthy of her love and loved no one but himself. If Trina asks where he came from or what he looked like, Joyce says he told her he came from all over and he looked like any man with selfish intentions. And that now the preacher is Trina’s father and no man on earth would do for them what he has done for them and for everyone at the commune.

  Trina’s longing remains undiminished despite what her mother says. She sees the mailman and thinks what she feels must be multiplied in the bodies of everyone on the compound. Combine all that longing and hope and they should fill those huge mailbags, each longing in the shape of an envelope, each hope a sheet of paper filled with writing and sealed inside. Trina glances about and sees how everyone nearby, from the kitchen to the laundry to the cleaners and yard workers, lingers and tries to look at the mailman without making it obvious, how slow they become with half of their attention on the job and the more important half on the mailman. The van turns in three points and accelerates away and raises a little dust that disperses while it raises those seeds of longing and hope.