Chapter One

Danny

I met Tesseba on a bus in Boston in 1978. She's the sort that peers over your shoulder when you're reading and makes some uninvited comment, and that's exactly how it happened. For a moment you resent the intrusion and sometimes you brush it away but sometimes you don't, depending on your mood. I've seen it replayed dozens of times since then, on airplanes and park benches and in waiting rooms. Tesseba has a disarming manner, which is why she gets away with it -- that and a gamin face which is both mournful and exotic, and draws you to her.

So she leaned over and asked what I was examining so intently, and then one thing led to another. I was examining the difference between life and death. But how could I describe that to her?

It was wintertime and whether an almanac would confirm that it was especially cold that winter or not I don't know, but to me it was as cold as death itself.

"What are those?" she asked.

"Government forms."

"They look intimidating."

"They are, rather."

"What accent is that?"

Only a month, and already the question made me wary. What started as a casual inquiry always invited a comment after it had been answered, an opinion, a probing to see where I stood, to see if I passed some sort of muster. And most people knew so little.

"South African," I said and looked out the window.

The wind could lift the snow up, I'd learned, twirl it, sweep it against your skin.

"Is that where you're from?" Tesseba asked.

"Yes."

"How neat."

"Neat?"

"It's an American word."

"I know that," I said.

"How long have you been here?" she asked.

And so Tesseba and I were on our way.

Even if it was not the coldest winter on record, what made it bone chilling was how unprepared for it I was. It hadn't been that many weeks before, after all, that I had been standing at the great picture window overlooking Gordonwood's swimming pool, watching the awnings flap, the leaves blowing across the patio, the goldenrod sending showers of orange buds over the grass. Death was everywhere, blood still on the walls almost, all life at a standstill.

It's where my thoughts were when Tesseba interrupted them.
 

***

Tesseba has stayed with me for all these years, through thick and thin, or, more appropriately, through thin and thick. I'm not really wealthy now but when I met her I had nothing, not even a proper winter coat or insulated boots. Melted snow would creep in around the edges of my soles and squeeze about in my socks for hours until I was able to take them off. I had never seen anything like it. In Africa people didn't stow themselves in insulated rooms waiting for a thaw, the air was warm and moist, you feared snakes, perhaps, drunks, runaway buses, a rabid monkey taunting with acorns and squeals, but not the air itself, snaps of wind so sudden they made you gasp. In Africa you could make mistakes, missteps, somehow muddle through, but in Boston if you made a mistake you could die, freeze to death or worse, fall without any hope of being stopped or saved.

Tesseba had a strange little loft apartment in the middle of nowhere when I met her. Even today I don't know what the area's called. You go over a bridge and across an expanse of warped asphalt and then you come upon a scrabbly hodgepodge of half-used warehouses and half-filled tenements. A number of artists lived in the warehouses, and Tesseba was one of them. I think her rent was thirty-five dollars a month. It sounded almost as cheap then as it does now.

"What are those forms?" she asked on the bus.

"Asylum papers," I said.

"What sort of asylum?"

I knew what she was thinking, toyed for a moment with the prospect of leading her on, letting her think I was some kind of lunatic. But it wouldn't have worked. Alongside her picture in a Providence high school yearbook - straight hair, smooth skin, closed-mouth smile - is the entry: "Semper Fidelis." Knowing Tesseba now I don't think it would have changed how she regarded me.

"Political asylum," I said.

"Wow," she said. "Were you a political prisoner?"

"Not exactly."

"Is that one of the ways you could get to stay here?"

"Yes," I said. "I just came from a legal aid center."

"Is it hard to get?"

"Yes."

"Is it the only way?"

"The other way is to marry an American," I said.

I know as I look back on it that I said it with a touch of mischief, an edge.

"I'd marry you," she volunteered.

"You don't even know me," I said.

"I know enough," she said. "Not marry marry. Just marry. Maybe marry marry. I don't know about that."

It's peculiar, really, how after an exchange like that nothing is barred even as it was one of those conversations that could also have ended in nothing. We could have reached her stop and she could have stood up and left the bus and we could never have seen each other again, the whole exchange nothing more than an odd moment, something on the margins of memory. But instead when we reached her stop I got off with her and we walked, without commenting on what we were doing, down the barren street and across the lot to her building.

"Do you want to come up?" she asked.

"Sure," I said.

"Where do you live?"

"At the Y," I told her. "I'm hoping to get a place when things are more settled."

"You could stay here, if you wanted," she offered.

I looked up at the building with its dirty brick face, boarded windows, rusting fire escape.

"How can you make an offer like that?" I asked. "You only just met me and you're making all sorts of offers. I could be anything. Somebody who really needs an asylum."

"Sure," she said. "But you aren't."

"How do you know?"

"Am I wrong?"

"No," I said. "But you could be."

"Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?" she asked.

She took my hand and led me to a window beside the building's entrance.

"Look."

I saw myself and then next to me a dark, pretty girl wearing blue jeans and boots, a coarse woolen scarf wrapped around her neck, a heavy blue jacket. Behind us were parked cars.

"Not at me," she said. "At you, with your neatly parted hair and little blue blazer."

"So?"

"I'm not wrong about things like this," she said.

Her apartment was narrow and long with a floor to ceiling window at one end and a steel sliding door at the other. The roof was very high and run with pipes and long-abandoned pulleys, and for lights there were canisters the size of dustbin lids with large glaring bulbs that you turned on and off by pulling on a rope. There was a knee-high refrigerator in one corner and a little gas stove with its own cylinder in another.

"This is quaint," I said.

"Quaint good or quaint bad?"

"Is this meant to be a place to live?" I asked. "I mean, are you supposed to be living here?"

She was taken aback.

"Of course I am," she said. "I have a landlord and everything. It used to be a warehouse where they kept stuff. Sometimes you can still smell the things that have been here. But of course it's an apartment."

I thought I may have offended her. She walked to the window and began to lift it.

"I didn't mean to criticize."

The air smelled vaguely of sawdust, that and seawater. It was all somehow familiar.

"My father had a warehouse like this in South Africa," I said. "He exported things to Europe and America."

"What kind of things?"

"Things," I said. "Cloves, ivory, wood, pepper."

"Does he still?" she asked.

"It became difficult with the boycotts," I said. "And he died last year."

"I'm sorry," she said. "Is your mother okay?"

"She's still in South Africa," I said. "She can't leave yet."

"Why?"

"She just can't."

"Sisters and brothers?"

"Just my sister, Bridget."

"What does she do, Bridget?" Tesseba asked.

I paused.

"Bridget's in jail," I told her.