Flowering Judas(130)

Shpetim Kika had lived most of his life in a Communist country. He knew when the news was complete and utter bullshit. He thought what he’d just heard was at least half that. What made him happy was that somebody had mentioned the baby. It was as if he had been trying to push a boulder uphill and it had finally budged.

There was a guy, Shpetim thought. From literature. He pushed the boulder uphill over and over and over again, and as soon as he reached the top, it fell down again. Well, Shpetim decided, he’d beaten the guy from literature. He’d pushed his boulder up to the top of the hill and it had gone straight over.

Nderi and Anya were coming up to him now. Anya was chattering away, and smiling. Nderi was staggering a little under the box.

“Hey,” Nderi said, reaching the construction shed. He put the box down on the ground in front of the door. “Anya brought food. She and Mom have been cooking all morning.”

“I have the day off from work,” Anya said. “There was a funeral. One of our people died. We got off for the funeral and then there was the reception, but I didn’t go to any of it. It wasn’t somebody I know.”

“Heart attack,” Nderi said solemnly, looking down at the box of food.

“At forty-six,” Anya said. “It was truly awful. You’d think he’d know better, being in the medical profession. But you can’t tell with people. And even the ones you think are doing everything right, they die, too. And then there are others who break all the rules, and there they still are at eighty-seven.”

“My grandfather lived to ninety-five,” Shpetim said. “And he wasn’t senile, either. He lived to ninety-five and scared the hell out of all of us to the end of his life.”

“I don’t remember any of my grandfathers,” Anya said. “They both died in jail.”

Nderi picked up the box again and came into the shed with it. He put it on the little desk and looked inside it. “I keep telling her she should think of them as martyrs,” he said. “I mean, it’s not the same as dying because you’re upholding the honor of God, but it is, in a way, because they wouldn’t have been arrested if they hadn’t been Muslims. I mean—”

“It’s all right,” Anya said. “I understand what you’re getting at.”

Shpetim looked into the box and came up with an enormous loaf of bread and then what looked like a vat of lamb and beans. There were utensils at the bottom of the box. That was a good thing.

“Ah,” he said. “I forgot. I heard it on the television. Yeah, yeah, I know. But you could hear it a couple of minutes ago. There’s going to be an arrest this afternoon, you know, an arrest about all the nonsense, not just Chester Morton but—”

“Oh,” Anya said. “Those two people out near the dam. Wasn’t that awful?”

“Listen,” Shpetim said. “Maybe it was awful and maybe it was not. These people. You hear things. The people in that trailer park—”

“You can’t look down on people just because they’re poor,” Nderi said. “You told me that yourself. You used to be poor.”

“I don’t look down on people because they’re poor,” Shpetim said. “I have never done that. It’s not the poverty, but the way they live. Having children where there is no marriage. Living off the government when they could be working. And the alcohol. And the drugs. You know what I’m saying. You do not know what those people are. You can’t say it was terrible until you know.”

“No,” Anya said, “I think it was terrible anyway. I think it’s terrible when anybody dies, and as for the way they lived. Well. You don’t know what happened to make them like that. And even if nothing did, even if they decided for themselves to live badly, isn’t that a tragedy, too? God gives us life. It’s terrible when we waste it.”

“Yes,” Shpetim said, caught again by the fact that he was being reminded of something. He still couldn’t think of what. He turned to the television set and waved his hands. “Anyway,” he said. “It came on the television. There is going to be an arrest. There is a break in the case. The break in the case came through the skeleton of the baby. See? I was right all along. The baby was important. And now, since we went and talked to Mr. Demarkian, they will be able to arrest the evil man who did these things, and everybody will be safer. It’s America, the way I told you. In America, you go to the police, you state your case, the right thing gets done.”

“But we didn’t go to the police,” Nderi said. “We went to Mr. Demarkian.”