Jump and Other Stories

Some Are Born to Sweet Delight

They took him in. Since their son had got himself signed up at sea for eighteen months on an oil rig, the boy’s cubbyhole of a room was vacant; and the rent money was a help. There had rubbed off on the braid of the commissionaire father’s uniform, through the contact of club members’ coats and briefcases he relieved them of, loyal consciousness of the danger of bombs affixed under the cars of members of parliament and financiers. The father said ‘I’ve no quarrel with that’ when the owners of the house whose basement flat the family occupied stipulated ‘No Irish’. But to discriminate against any other foreigners from the old Empire was against the principles of the house owners, who were also the mother’s employers — cleaning three times a week and baby-sitting through the childhood of three boys she thought of as her own. So it was a way of pleasing Upstairs to let the room to this young man, a foreigner who likely had been turned away from other vacancies posted on a board at the supermarket. He was clean and tidy enough; and he didn’t hang around the kitchen, hoping to be asked to eat with the family, the way one of their own kind would. He didn’t eye Vera.

Vera was seventeen, and a filing clerk with prospects of advancement; her father had got her started in an important firm through the kindness of one of his gentlemen at the club. A word in the right place; and now it was up to her to become a secretary, maybe one day even a private secretary to someone like the members of the club, and travel to the Continent, America — anywhere.

— You have to dress decently for a firm like that. Let others show their backsides.—

— Dad! — The flat was small, the walls thin — suppose the lodger heard him. Her pupils dilated with a blush, half shyness, half annoyance. On Friday and Saturday nights she wore T-shirts with spangled graffiti across her breasts and went with girl-friends to the discothèque, although she’d had to let the pink side of her hair grow out. On Sundays they sat on wooden benches outside the pub with teasing local boys, drinking beer shandies. Once it was straight beer laced with something and they made her drunk, but her father had been engaged as doorman for a private party and her mother had taken the Upstairs children to the zoo, so nobody heard her vomiting in the bathroom.

So she thought.

He was in the kitchen when she went, wiping the slime from her panting mouth, to drink water. He always addressed her as ‘miss’—Good afternoon, miss. — He was himself filling a glass.

She stopped where she was; sourness was in her mouth and nose, oozing towards the foreign stranger, she mustn’t go a step nearer. Shame tingled over nausea and tears. Shame heaved in her stomach, her throat opened, and she just reached the sink in time to disgorge the final remains of a pizza minced by her teeth and digestive juices, floating in beer. — Go away. Go away! — her hand flung in rejection behind her. She opened both taps to blast her shame down the drain. — Get out!—

He was there beside her, in the disgusting stink of her, and he had wetted a dish-towel and was wiping her face, her dirty mouth, her tears. He was steadying her by the arm and sitting her down at the kitchen table. And she knew that his kind didn’t even drink, he probably never had smelled alcohol before. If it had been one of her own crowd it would have been different.

She began to cry again. Very quietly, slowly, he put his hand on hers, taking charge of the wrist like a doctor preparing to follow the measure of a heart in a pulse-beat. Slowly — the pace was his — she quietened; she looked down, without moving her head, at the hand. Slowly, she drew her own hand from underneath, in parting.

As she left the kitchen a few meaningless echoes of what had happened to her went back and forth — are you all right yes I’m all right are you sure yes I’m all right.

She slept through her parents’ return and next morning said she’d had flu.

He could no longer be an unnoticed presence in the house, outside her occupation with her work and the friends she made among the other junior employees, and her preoccupation, in her leisure, with the discothèque and cinema where the hand-holding and sex-tussles with local boys took place. He said, Good afternoon, as they saw each other approaching in the passage between the family’s quarters and his room, or couldn’t avoid coinciding at the gate of the tiny area garden where her mother’s geraniums bloomed and the empty milk bottles were set out. He didn’t say ‘miss’; it was as if the omission were assuring, Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone, although I know all about what you do, everything, I won’t talk about you among my friends — did he even have any friends? Her mother told her he worked in the kitchens of a smart restaurant — her mother had to be sure a lodger had steady pay before he could be let into the house. Vera saw other foreigners like him about, gathered loosely as if they didn’t know where to go; of course, they didn’t come to the disco and they were not part of the crowd of familiars at the cinema. They were together but looked alone. It was something noticed the way she might notice, without expecting to fathom, the strange expression of a caged animal, far from wherever it belonged.

She owed him a signal in return for his trustworthiness. Next time they happened to meet in the house she said — I’m Vera.—

As if he didn’t know, hadn’t heard her mother and father call her. Again he did the right thing, merely nodded politely.

— I’ve never really caught your name.—

— Our names are hard for you, here. Just call me Rad. — His English was stiff, pronounced syllable by syllable in a soft voice.

— So it’s short for something?—

— What is that?—

— A nickname. Bob for Robert.—

— Something like that.—

She ended this first meeting on a new footing the only way she knew how — Well, see you later, then — the vague dismissal used casually among her friends when no such commitment existed. But on a Sunday when she was leaving the house to wander down to see who was gathered at the pub she went up the basement steps and saw that he was in the area garden. He was reading newspapers — three or four of them stacked on the mud-plastered grass at his side. She picked up his name and used it for the first time, easily as a key turning in a greased lock. — Hullo, Rad.—

He rose from the chair he had brought out from his room. — I hope your mother won’t mind? I wanted to ask, but she’s not at home.—

— Oh no, not Ma, we’ve had that old chair for ages, a bit of fresh air won’t crack it up more than it is already.—

She stood on the short path, he stood beside the old rattan chair; then sat down again so that she could walk off without giving offence — she left to her friends, he left to his reading.

She said — I won’t tell.—

And so it was out, what was between them alone, in the family house. And they laughed, smiled, both of them. She walked over to where he sat. — Got the day off? You work in some restaurant, don’t you, what’s it like?—

— I’m on the evening shift today. — He stayed himself a moment, head on one side, with aloof boredom. — It’s something. Just a job. What you can get.—

— I know. But I suppose working in a restaurant at least the food’s thrown in, as well.—

He looked out over the railings a moment, away from her. — I don’t eat that food.—

She began to be overcome by a strong reluctance to go through the gate, round the corner, down the road to The Mitre and the whistles and appreciative pinches which would greet her in her new flowered Bermudas, his black eyes following her all the way, although he’d be reading his papers with her forgotten. To gain time she looked at the papers. The one in his hand was English. On the others, lying there, she was confronted with a flowing script of tails and gliding flourishes, the secret of somebody else’s language. She could not go to the pub; she could not let him know that was where she was going. The deceptions that did for parents were not for him. But the fact was there was no deception: she wasn’t going to the pub, she suddenly wasn’t going.

She sat down on the motoring section of the English newspaper he’d discarded and crossed her legs in an X from the bare round knees. — Good news from home?—

He gestured with his foot towards the papers in his secret language; his naked foot was an intimate object, another secret.

— From my home, no good news.—

She understood this must be some business about politics, over there — she was in awe and ignorance of politics, nothing to do with her. — So that’s why you went away.—

He didn’t need to answer.

— You know, I can’t imagine going away.—

— You don’t want to leave your friends.—

She caught the allusion, pulled a childish face, dismissing them. — Mum and Dad… everything.—

He nodded, as if in sympathy for her imagined loss, but made no admission of what must be his own.

— Though I’m mad keen to travel. I mean, that’s my idea, taking this job. Seeing other places — just visiting, you know. If I make myself capable and that, I might get the chance. There’s one secretary in our offices who goes everywhere with her boss, she brings us all back souvenirs, she’s very generous.—

— You want to see the world. But now your friends are waiting for you—

She shook off the insistence with a laugh. — And you want to go home!—

— No. — He looked at her with the distant expression of an adult before the innocence of a child. — Not yet.—

The authority of his mood over hers, that had been established in the kitchen that time, was there. She was hesitant and humble rather than flirtatious when she changed the subject. — Shall we have — will you have some tea if I make it? Is it all right? — He’d never eaten in the house; perhaps the family’s food and drink were taboo for him in his religion, like the stuff he could have eaten free in the restaurant.

He smiled. — Yes it’s all right. — And he got up and padded along behind her on his slim feet to the kitchen. As with a wipe over the clean surfaces of her mother’s sink and table, the other time in the kitchen was cleared by ordinary business about brewing tea, putting out cups. She set him to cut the gingerbread — Go on, try it, it’s my mother’s homemade. — She watched with an anxious smile, curiosity, while his beautiful teeth broke into its crumbling softness. He nodded, granting grave approval with a full mouth. She mimicked him, nodding and smiling; and, like a doe approaching a leaf, she took from his hand the fragrant slice with the semicircle marked by his teeth, and took a bite out of it.

Vera didn’t go to the pub any more. At first they came to look for her — her chums, her mates — and nobody believed her excuses when she wouldn’t come along with them. She hung about the house on Sundays, helping her mother. — Have you had a tiff or something?—

As she always told her bosom friends, she was lucky with her kind of mother, not strict and suspicious like some. — No, Ma. They’re okay, but it’s always the same thing, same things to say, every weekend.—

— Well… shows you’re growing up, moving on — it’s natural. You’ll find new friends, more interesting, more your type.—

Vera listened to hear if he was in his room or had had to go to work — his shifts at the restaurant, she had learnt from timing his presence and absences, were irregular. He was very quiet, didn’t play a radio or cassettes but she always could feel if he was there, in his room. That summer was a real summer for once; if he was off shift he would bring the old rattan chair into the garden and read, or stretch out his legs and lie back with his face lifted to the humid sun. He must be thinking of where he came from; very hot, she imagined it, desert and thickly-white cubes of houses with palm trees. She went out with a rug — nothing unusual about wanting to sunbathe in your own area garden — and chatted to him as if just because he happened to be there. She watched his eyes travelling from right to left along the scrolling print of his newspapers, and when he paused, yawned, rested his head and closed his lids against the light, could ask him about home — his home. He described streets and cities and cafés and bazaars — it wasn’t at all like her idea of desert and oases. — But there are palm trees?—

— Yes, nightclubs, rich people’s palaces to show tourists, but there are also factories and prison camps and poor people living on a handful of beans a day.—

She picked at the grass: I see. — Were you — were your family — do you like beans?—

He was not to be drawn; he was never to be drawn.

— If you know how to make them, they are good.—

— If we get some, will you tell us how they’re cooked?—

— I’ll make them for you.—

So one Sunday Vera told her mother Rad, the lodger, wanted to prepare a meal for the family. Her parents were rather touched; nice, here was a delicate mark of gratitude, such a glum character, he’d never shown any sign before. Her father was prepared to put up with something that probably wouldn’t agree with him. — Different people, different ways. Maybe it’s a custom with them, when they’re taken in, like bringing a bunch of flowers. — The meal went off well. The dish was delicious and not too spicy; after all, gingerbread was spiced, too. When her father opened a bottle of beer and put it down at Rad’s place, Vera quickly lifted it away. — He doesn’t drink, Dad.—

Graciousness called forth graciousness; Vera’s mother issued a reciprocal invitation. — You must come and have our Sunday dinner one day — my chicken with apple pie to follow.—

But the invitation was in the same code as ‘See you later’. It was not mentioned again. One Sunday Vera shook the grass from her rug. — I’m going for a walk. — And the lodger slowly got up from his chair, put his newspaper aside, and they went through the gate. The neighbours must have seen her with him. The pair went where she led, although they were side by side, loosely, the way she’d seen young men of his kind together. They went on walking a long way, down streets and then into a park. She loved to watch people flying kites; now he was the one who watched her as she watched. It seemed to be his way of getting to know her; to know anything. It wasn’t the way of other boys — her kind — but then he was a foreigner here, there must be so much he needed to find out. Another weekend she had the idea to take a picnic. That meant an outing for the whole day. She packed apples and bread and cheese — remembering no ham — under the eyes of her mother. There was a silence between them. In it was her mother’s recognition of the accusation she, Vera, knew she ought to bring against herself: Vera was ‘chasing’ a man; this man. All her mother said was — Are you joining other friends? — She didn’t he. — No. He’s never been up the river. I thought we’d take a boat trip.—

In time she began to miss the cinema. Without guile she asked him if he had seen this film or that; she presumed that when he was heard going out for the evening the cinema would be where he went, with friends of his — his kind — she never saw. What did they do if they didn’t go to a movie? It wouldn’t be bars, and she knew instinctively he wouldn’t be found in a disco, she couldn’t see him shaking and stomping under twitching coloured lights.

He hadn’t seen any film she mentioned. — Won’t you come? — It happened like the first walk. He looked at her again as he had then. — D’you think so?—

— Why ever not. Everybody goes to movies.—

But she knew why not. She sat beside him in the theatre with solemnity. It was unlike any other time, in that familiar place of pleasure. He did not hold her hand; only that time, that time in the kitchen. They went together to the cinema regularly. The silence between her and her parents grew; her mother was like a cheerful bird whose cage had been covered. Whatever her mother and father thought, whatever they feared — nothing had happened, nothing happened until one public holiday when Vera and the lodger were both off work and they went on one of their long walks into the country (that was all they could do, he didn’t play sport, there wasn’t any activity with other young people he knew how to enjoy). On that day celebrated for a royal birthday or religious anniversary that couldn’t mean anything to him, in deep grass under profound trees he made love to Vera for the first time. He had never so much as kissed her, before, not on any evening walking home from the cinema, not when they were alone in the house and the opportunity was obvious as the discretion of the kitchen clock sounding through the empty passage, and the blind eye of the television set in the sitting-room. All that he had never done with her was begun and accomplished with unstoppable passion, summoned up as if at a mere command to himself; between this and the placing of his hand on hers in the kitchen, months before, there was nothing. Now she had the lips from which, like a doe, she had taken a morsel touched with his saliva, she had the naked body promised by the first glimpse of the naked feet. She had lost her virginity, like all her sister schoolgirls, at fourteen or fifteen, she had been fucked, half-struggling, by some awkward local in a car or a back room, once or twice. But now she was overcome, amazed, engulfed by a sensuality she had no idea was inside her, a bounty of talent unexpected and unknown as a burst of song would have been welling from one who knew she had no voice. She wept with love for this man who might never, never have come to her, never have found her from so far away. She wept because she was so afraid it might so nearly never have happened. He wiped her tears, he dressed her with the comforting resignation to her emotion a mother shows with an over-excited child.

She didn’t hope to conceal from her mother what they were doing; she knew her mother knew. Her mother felt her gliding silently from her room down the passage to the lodger’s room, the room that still smelt of her brother, late at night, and returning very early in the morning. In the dark Vera knew every floorboard that creaked, how to avoid the swish of her pyjamas touching past a wall; at dawn saw the squinting beam of the rising sun sloped through a window that she had never known was so placed it could let in any phase of the sun’s passage across the sky. Everything was changed.

What could her mother have said? Maybe he had different words in his language; the only ones she and her mother had wouldn’t do, weren’t meant for a situation not provided for in their lives. Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what he is? We don’t have any objection to them, but all the same. What about your life? What about the good firm your father’s got you into? What’ll it look like, there?

The innocent release of sensuality in the girl gave her an authority that prevailed in the house. She brought him to the table for meals, now; he ate what he could. Her parents knew this presence, in the code of their kind, only as the signal by which an ‘engaged’ daughter would bring home her intended. But outwardly between Vera and her father and mother the form was kept up that his position was still that of a lodger, a lodger who had somehow become part of the household in that capacity. There was no need for him to pretend or assume any role; he never showed any kind of presumption towards their daughter, spoke to her with the same reserve that he, a stranger, showed to them. When he and the girl rose from the table to go out together it was always as if he accompanied her, without interest, at her volition.

Because her father was a man, even if an old one and her father, he recognized the power of sensuality in a female and was defeated, intimidated by its obstinacy. He couldn’t take the whole business up with her; her mother must do that. He quarrelled with his wife over it. So she confronted their daughter. Where will it end? Both she and the girl understood: he’ll go back where he comes from, and where’ll you be? He’ll drop you when he’s had enough of what he wanted from you.

Where would it end? Rad occasionally acknowledged her among his friends, now — it turned out he did have some friends, yes, young men like him, from his home. He and she encountered them on the street and instead of excusing himself and leaving her waiting obediently like one of those pet dogs tied up outside the supermarket, as he usually had done when he went over to speak to his friends, he took her with him and, as if remembering her presence after a minute or two of talk, interrupted himself: She’s Vera. Their greetings, the way they looked at her, made her feel that he had told them about her, after all, and she was happy. They made remarks in their own language she was sure referred to her. If she had moved on, from the pub, the disco, the parents, she was accepted, belonged somewhere else.

And then she found she was pregnant. She had no girlfriend to turn to who could be trusted not to say those things: he’ll go back where he comes from he’ll drop you when he’s had enough of what he wanted from you. After the second month she bought a kit from the pharmacy and tested her urine. Then she went to a doctor because that do-it-yourself thing might be mistaken.

— I thought you said you would be all right.—

That was all he said, after thinking for a moment, when she told him.

— Don’t worry, I’ll find something. I’ll do something about it. I’m sorry, Rad. Just forget it. — She was afraid he would stop loving her — her term for love-making.

When she went to him tentatively that night he caressed her more beautifully and earnestly than ever while possessing her.

She remembered reading in some women’s magazine that it was dangerous to do anything to get rid of ‘it’ (she gave her pregnancy no other identity) after three months. Through roundabout enquiries she found a doctor who did abortions, and booked an appointment, taking an advance on her holiday bonus to meet the fee asked.

— By the way, it’ll be all over next Saturday. I’ve found someone. — Timidly, that week, she brought up the subject she had avoided between them.

He looked at her as if thinking very carefully before he spoke, thinking apart from her, in his own language, as she was often sure he was doing. Perhaps he had forgotten — it was really her business, her fault, she knew. Then he pronounced what neither had — The baby?—

— Well… — She waited, granting this.

He did not take her in his arms, he did not touch her. — You will have the baby. We will marry.—

It flew from her awkward, unbelieving, aghast with joy — You want to marry me!—

— Yes, you’re going to be my wife.—

— Because of this? — a baby?—

He was gazing at her intensely, wandering over the sight of her. — Because I’ve chosen you.—

Of course, being a foreigner, he didn’t come out with things the way an English speaker would express them.

And I love you, she said, I love you, I love you — babbling through vows and tears. He put a hand on one of hers, as he had done in the kitchen of her mother’s house; once, and never since.

She saw a couple in a mini-series standing hand-in-hand, telling them; ‘We’re getting married’—hugs and laughter.

But she told her parents alone, without him there. It was safer that way, she thought, for him. And she phrased it in proof of his good intentions as a triumphant answer to her mother’s warnings, spoken and unspoken. — Rad’s going to marry me.—

— He wants to marry you? — Her mother corrected. The burst of a high-pitched cry. The father twitched an angry look at his wife.

Now it was time for the scene to conform to the TV family announcement. — We’re going to get married.—

Her father’s head flew up and sank slowly, he turned away.

— You want to be married to him? — Her mother’s palm spread on her breast to cover the blow.

The girl was brimming feeling, reaching for them.

Her father was shaking his head like a sick dog.

— And I’m pregnant and he’s glad.—

Her mother turned to her father but there was no help coming from him. She spoke impatiently flatly. — So that’s it.—

— No, that’s not it. It’s not it at all. — She would not say to them ‘I love him’, she would not let them spoil that by trying to make her feel ashamed. — It’s what I want.—

— It’s what she wants. — Her mother was addressing her father.

He had to speak. He gestured towards his daughter’s body, where there was no sign yet to show life growing there. — Nothing to be done then.—

When the girl had left the room he glared at his wife. — Bloody bastard.—

— Hush. Hush. — There was a baby to be born, poor innocent.

And it was, indeed, the new life the father had gestured at in Vera’s belly that changed everything. The foreigner, the lodger — had to think of him now as the future son-in-law, Vera’s intended — told Vera and her parents he was sending her to his home for his parents to meet her. — To your country?—

He answered with the gravity with which, they realized, marriage was regarded where he came from. — The bride must meet the parents. They must know her as I know hers.—

If anyone had doubted the seriousness of his intentions — well, they could be ashamed of those doubts, now; he was sending her home, openly and proudly, his foreigner, to be accepted by his parents. — But have you told them about the baby, Rad? — She didn’t express this embarrassment in front of her mother and father. — What do you think? That is why you are going. — He slowed, then spoke again. — It’s a child of our family.—

So she was going to travel at last! In addition to every other joy! In a state of continual excitement between desire for Rad — now openly sharing her room with her — and the pride of telling her work-mates why she was taking her annual leave just then, she went out of her way to encounter former friends whom she had avoided. To say she was travelling to meet her fiance’s family; she was getting married in a few months, she was having a baby — yes — proof of this now in the rounding under the flowered jumpsuit she wore to show it off. For her mother, too, a son-in-law who was not one of their kind became a distinction rather than a shame. — Our Vera’s a girl who’s always known her own mind. It’s a changing world, she’s not one just to go on repeating the same life as we’ve had. — The only thing that hadn’t changed in the world was joy over a little one coming. Vera was thrilled, they were all thrilled at the idea of a baby, a first grandchild. Oh that one was going to be spoilt all right! The prospective grandmother was knitting, although Vera laughed and said babies weren’t dressed in that sort of thing any more, hers was going to wear those little unisex frog suits in bright colours. There was a deposit down on a pram fit for an infant prince or princess.

It was understood that if the intended could afford to send his girl all the way home just to meet his parents before the wedding, he had advanced himself in the restaurant business, despite the disadvantages young men like him had in an unwelcoming country. Upstairs was pleased with the news; Upstairs came down one evening and brought a bottle of champagne as a gift to toast Vera, whom they’d known since she was a child, and her boy — much pleasant laughter when the prospective husband filled everyone’s glass and then served himself with orange juice. Even the commissionaire felt confident enough to tell one of his gentlemen at the club that his daughter was getting married, but first about to go abroad to meet the young man’s parents. His gentlemen’s children were always travelling; in his ears every day were overheard snatches of destinations— ‘by bicycle in China, can you believe it’… ‘two months in Peru, rather nice…’… ‘snorkeling on the Barrier Reef, last I heard’. Visiting her future parents-in-law where there is desert and palm trees; not bad!

The parents wanted to have a little party, before she left, a combined engagement party and farewell. Vera had in mind a few of her old friends brought together with those friends of his she’d been introduced to and with whom she knew he still spent some time — she didn’t expect to go along with him, it wasn’t their custom for women, and she couldn’t understand their language, anyway. But he didn’t seem to think a party would work. She had her holiday bonus (to remember what she had drawn it for, originally, was something that, feeling the baby tapping its presence softly inside her, she couldn’t believe of herself) and she kept asking him what she could buy as presents for his family — his parents, his sisters and brothers, she had learnt all their names. He said he would buy things, he knew what to get. As the day for her departure approached, he still had not done so. — But I want to pack! I want to know how much room to leave, Rad! — He brought some men’s clothing she couldn’t judge and some dresses and scarves she didn’t like but didn’t dare say so — she supposed the clothes his sisters liked were quite different from what she enjoyed wearing — a good thing she hadn’t done the choosing.

She didn’t want her mother to come to the airport; they’d both be too emotional. Leaving Rad was strangely different; it was not leaving Rad but going, carrying his baby, to the mystery that was Rad, that was in Rad’s silences, his blind love-making, the way he watched her, thinking in his own language so that she could not follow anything in his eyes. It would all be revealed when she arrived where he came from.

He had to work, the day she left, until it was time to take her to the airport. Two of his friends, whom she could scarcely recognize from the others in the group she had met occasionally, came with him to fetch her in the taxi one of them drove. She held Rad’s hand, making a tight double fist on his thigh, while the men talked in their language. At the airport the others left him to go in alone with her. He gave her another, last-minute gift for home. — Oh Rad — where’m I going to put it? The ticket says one hand-baggage! — But she squeezed his arm in happy recognition of his thoughts for his family. — It can go in — easy, easy. — He unzipped her carryall as they stood in the queue at the check-in counter. She knelt with her knees spread to accommodate her belly, and helped him. — What is it, anyway — I hope not something that’s going to break? — He was making a bed for the package. — Just toys for my sister’s kid. Plastic. — I could have put them in the suitcase — oh Rad… what room’ll I have for duty-free! — In her excitement, she was addressing the queue for the American airline’s flight which would take her on the first leg of her journey. These fellow passengers were another kind of foreigner, Americans, but she felt she knew them all; they were going to be travelling in her happiness, she was taking them with her.

She held him with all her strength and he kept her pressed against his body; she could not see his face. He stood and watched her as she went through passport control and she stopped again and again to wave but she saw Rad could not wave, could not wave. Only watch her until he could not see her any longer. And she saw him in her mind, still looking at her, as she had done at the beginning when she had imagined herself as still under his eyes if she had gone to the pub on a Sunday morning.

Over the sea, the airliner blew up in midair. Everyone on board died. The black box was recovered from the bed of the sea and revealed that there had been an explosion in the tourist-class cabin followed by a fire; and there the messages ended; silence, the disintegration of the plane. No one knows if all were killed outright or if some survived to drown. An inquiry into the disaster continued for a year. The background of every passenger was traced, and the circumstances that led to the journey of each. There were some arrests; people detained for questioning and then released. They were innocent — but they were foreigners, of course. Then there was another disaster of the same nature, and a statement from a group with an apocalyptic name representing a faction of the world’s wronged, claiming the destruction of both planes in some complication of vengeance for holy wars, land annexation, invasions, imprisonments, cross-border raids, territorial disputes, bombings, sinkings, kidnappings no one outside the initiated could understand. A member of the group, a young man known as Rad among many other aliases, had placed in the hand-baggage of the daughter of the family with whom he lodged, and who was pregnant by him, an explosive device. Plastic. A bomb of a plastic type undetectable by the usual procedures of airport security.

Vera was chosen.

Vera had taken them all, taken the baby inside her; down, along with her happiness.