Bobcat and Other Stories Read online

  “My name is Margit Bergen. I came to you once as a child.”

  “Hello, Margit. It’s nice to see you again. Was I helpful?”

  “Yes, very. I’ve always been grateful.”

  “What was the problem in those days?”

  “Just childhood depression, I guess. My parents were splitting up.”

  He squinted at me, and turned his face slightly to the side. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s right. Of course. Little Margit. You were such a girlie-whirl. So sad. What did you become?”

  “You mean in my life?”

  “In your life. What did you become?”

  “A soil consultant.”

  “What a good job for you.” He gestured toward the black leather chair. His birds fought in their high cages, their wings tearing at each other. “Mortalhead. You be nice to Eagerheart.” He turned to me. “The kids love funny names, you know. Mortalhead, Eagerheart, Quickeye.”

  I smiled and sat down in the chair, pulling a stack of letters from my bag. “Professor Pine,” I said.

  “Call me Roland,” he said. He leaned back. His face cracked in a tic. “Roland Boland. Just think: little Roland and little Margit, the professor and the soil consultant, back again, sitting in a warm office surrounded by bird-people.” He rolled his eyes and grinned, almost girlishly.

  I didn’t know what to say. “Yes, it’s nice,” I eventually said. “Actually, Roland, I was wondering if you could help me out with a problem I have.”

  “I thought I solved all your problems.” He looked disappointed.

  “You did. I mean, for twenty years you did.”

  “What could be the problem now?”

  “I need you to translate these letters for me, from Romanian.”

  “Romanian?” He took the stack of letters from me, and began to leaf through them. “Is your name Rezvan?” he said.

  “He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Then you should not read his letters.” He smiled.

  “Professor Pine, I really need you to do this for me.”

  “Who is Rilia?”

  “I don’t know. Look, you don’t even need to read them to me. Just read them to yourself and tell me if the people writing them are married.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “That doesn’t matter. I just do.”

  “Why?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Are you being a dirty-girlie?” He smiled—and then a tic, as forked as lightning.

  I sighed and looked over at his birds, who were cawing loudly. One was green with black wings, and it was flapping furiously, staring at the letters fluttering in Professor Pine’s hand.

  “Fine, Professor Pine. If you don’t want to read them, I’ll take them to somebody else.” I reached for the letters.

  He pulled them back, toward his chest. “Okay, okay, girlie,” he said. “You are so stubborn, Margit.”

  He read softly, in a lilting voice, as if he were reading me a bedtime story. “Rilia says, ‘Remember how tiny Florian was at his birth? Now he is forty-five kilos, the same as his brother.’ Rilia says, ‘Remember the Black Sea, it is as blue as the first time we went to it.’ Rilia says that Rezvan must be lying when he says there is so much food that sometimes he tosses rotten fruit from the window.”

  I interrupted. “Do you think they are married?”

  “Well, they are both Balescus.”

  “They could be brother and sister?”

  He frowned, and leafed through the letters again. “But here she calls him darling. Darling, barling, starling.”

  He looked up then. “Oh, no,” he said, “don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” He jumped up, came around the side of the desk, and crouched beside my chair. He looked up at me. His face was close, and the next tic was like slow motion. I saw the path that it followed, curving and winding like a river down his face.

  He sat back on the edge of his desk. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We just have to figure out what the girlie wants. If you want Rezvan, the liar face, you can have him. Is that what you want?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I do, but I can’t. He has kids and everything.”

  “Then it sounds like you’ve made up your mind already.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Margit, you need some perspective.”

  “Perspective?”

  “You know”—he rolled his eyes upward—“Slatland.”

  Slatland—I remembered that that was what he’d called it, the drifting up and looking down.

  “I’ve tried Slatland. It didn’t work,” I said.

  “Slatland always works. Just close your eyes, all right, girlie?”

  I started to stand up. “Thanks for your help, Professor Pine. I really have to go now.” But then I felt it, the lift, and my mind started rising, until the caws of Mortalhead and Eagerheart and Quickeye were far below me. I could see the yellow fields surrounding my town, and then even those went out of focus. I hurtled faster and faster until I finally stopped, what seemed like minutes later.

  So this is Slatland, I thought. I looked down, and to my left I saw North America, large and jagged, flanked by oceans. Its face was beautiful—craggy, broken, lined with rivers. I found my part of the continent, a flat gold rectangle in the upper middle. I saw what my daily life looked like from this distance: my truck beetling through the prairies, dust rising off its wheels the way desire must rise, thousands of fragments of stone lifting off the earth. And when the truck stopped and I stepped out into the bright, empty fields, my loneliness looked extreme. I could almost see it, my longing and desire for Rezvan rising out of me the way a tree rises out of its trunk. I perceived, in an instant, exactly what I should do to keep him. I saw how simple it all would be, just to keep collecting the letters every morning, one by one, in order that what was between Rezvan and his wife would die slowly and easily and naturally, and what was between him and me would grow in exactly the same proportion.

  If I had been able to climb down then, to drop out of Slatland at that moment, everything would have remained simple, and probably Rezvan and I would still be together. But Slatland seemed to have a will of its own. It would not let me go until I looked down to my right. If I was willing to see the simplicity, the purity, of my own desire, then I also had to see the entire landscape—the way desire rises from every corner and intersects, creates a wilderness over the earth.

  I stood on Slatland a long time before I looked down to my right. There is was, Eastern Europe, floating above the Mediterranean. I traced with my finger the outline of Romania. I squinted, down through the mist and mountains, down through the thick moss of trees, until I found her. She stood in a long line of people, her forty-five-kilo children hanging on her skirts. She bent to them and broke for them some bread as hard as stone. I hovered a few feet above her and watched. Even so, I might still have been able to return to my own life, my own province, unchanged if she hadn’t turned her face upward right then, as if she had felt some rain, and looked directly at me.

  This all happened very fast, in a blink of my eyes. When I opened them, Professor Pine was sitting on his desk, watching me. “You’re a real erky-terk,” he said, with a tic so extreme that it looked like it might swallow his face. He walked me to the door and handed me the letters, which later that night I would give to Rezvan. We would be standing on the balcony in the semidarkness of the moon, and I would be surprised at how easily they passed through my hands, as easily as water.

  The birds shrieked. “Birdmen!” Professor Pine said. “Sometimes I feel like saluting them,” he said to me. He shook my hand. “Good luck, girlie-whirl.” Then he went up on his tiptoes and kissed me good-bye.

  Min

  I sat on a metal folding chair, facing the five members of the Student-Faculty Relations Committee—one dean, two professors, and two students. Sunshine poured in. Carved in the wall above their heads were the words “Animus non integritatem sed facinus cupit,” mean
ing “The heart wills not purity but adventure.”

  Despite the sun, it was snowing outside—big delicate flakes. This was early February 1989, not a good year for romance. At least not in American universities.

  “Would you describe your relationship with Professor Harrison as intimate, then?” This was the dean, a large, gentle man.

  “Perhaps intimate, yes,” I said. Harrison, with whom I spent every Tuesday and Thursday in a seminar on Rilke, was an elegant, vaguely licentious man, whom I thought exuded longing for all things, not merely his female students. Truthfully, I was embarrassed to be here. I had been subpoenaed along with eleven other women, most of whom had complex stories to tell about Harrison. But he had made only a couple of standard passes at me. And I might have fallen for them had I not known he made passes regularly, almost randomly. His mistake with me, I admit, was less ethical than strategic.

  “Would you describe Professor Harrison’s attention as inappropriate?” asked Catherine Stole, a tall, cool woman. The previous semester I had attended her class on feminist literary theory.

  “Somewhat inappropriate, yes,” I said, “but not offensive.”

  “Not offensive?” She raised her eyebrows and looked at me disapprovingly, as if she were failing me retroactively. I stared back, maintaining silently that there was a place, even if just a thin window, where inappropriate and offensive did not intersect.

  “I would have been flattered,” said Min Leung, one of the students on the committee. He was an incredibly handsome man with a wide, bronze face, and he spoke happily, as if we were all just chatting. Everybody looked at him. He smiled and shrugged.

  I SAW MIN AGAIN a week later, in the grocery store, tossing a tomato in the air. “One of the harassment girls,” he said. “Hello, I forget your name.”

  “Sarah Johnson,” I said. “And you are Min Leung.”

  “Yes,” he said. We shook hands.

  “It must have been quite dull to sit through all that,” I said.

  “Oh no,” he said. “It was fascinating.”

  “Fascinating?”

  “Where I am from, to be desired is a great honor. In fact, the one who is desired feels immense gratitude, particularly if the one who desires is in a position of authority. The one who is desired showers the one who desires with gifts, sometimes for many years. Out of gratitude.”

  I was eating green grapes from a plastic bag. I smiled as I tried to imagine all of us carrying gifts to Harrison’s home, year after year.

  Nothing official happened to Harrison, but as winter passed into spring, I did notice him attempt to gaze across our classroom with a lesser trace of desire in his pale blue eyes. Meanwhile, outside the windows, our rolling religious campus gathered heat and moisture until it suddenly grew everywhere a velvety green grass. In the midst of the warm, humid spring Min and I became excellent and permanent friends.

  Min was a rare man. His personality was composed of both arrogance and a gentle gratitude. He wore the same thing every day: Levi’s, a white button-down shirt, and a black leather jacket. He had a motorcycle, and most evenings after dinner we went for long rides, into the dusky, sloppy countryside of southern Montana. We usually ended up at the cliffs, about a half-hour ride from campus.

  One of these nights, as we sat on a granite cliff, a sad line of cows moved in among the waters below us. The big bells around their necks rang. The sun was slung low in the distance. “I will miss this,” Min said. He pulled a couple of beers out of his backpack and gave me one. “And you?” he said, smiling through the dark. “What will you do without me?”

  “Could you stay the summer at least?”

  He shook his head. “My father,” he said.

  I nodded. Min’s father had found Min a job in his office that summer, and I knew, as well, that Min was worried about his father. A couple of months earlier, in mid-March, he had shown me an article in the New York Times that included a quotation from his father, Albert Leung. The quotation was brief and lyrical, and it carried the same sort of kindness and sadness that I would later discover in Albert himself: “We regret, as a colony, our inability to overcome compassion fatigue.”

  Min’s father had been recommended by Margaret Thatcher to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council in 1984. He worked in the council department that handled refugees arriving in Hong Kong. Most were Vietnamese, a group that had been arriving steadily since the fall of Saigon, in 1975. In the past couple of years, however, the number of refugees streaming in had risen sharply, causing a severe crisis.

  A couple of times I had watched Min answer the phone when his father called. Min would shout a warm “Ni hao!” into the phone and then fall silent. He would end the conversation in a low, staccato Cantonese.

  “Sarah,” Min said suddenly. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  I shook my head. “I’d love to, but I’m broke. Next summer, maybe.”

  “Next summer I’ll be married.”

  I blinked. “You’re engaged?”

  “Not yet. It will be arranged.”

  “An arranged marriage? No kidding? That’s depressing, Min.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What if you don’t like her?”

  “Then I won’t marry her. It only means that somebody will sift through the possibilities for me, with my best interests at heart.”

  “And whom do you trust to do this?”

  “Officially the father decides; unofficially the mother. But since my mother is dead, the unofficial screening has fallen to my father. He’s quite nervous about it.”

  “I guess. What a job.”

  Min sat down. “Sarah, listen, my father will pay for your flight.”

  “I’d feel funny taking your father’s money.”

  “Then he’ll give you a job. With me.”

  “I’m not really qualified to organize refugee relief.”

  “Well, who is?” he said, shrugging and grinning. “So it’s settled, then?” He leaned forward to kiss my cheek. His face was beautiful, with one thick vein running down his forehead, around his left eye.

  “Maybe,” I said, and then we sat silent for a while, Min’s foot drumming a little beat in the dirt. I said, “Min, I can’t believe that.”

  “What?”

  “That your marriage will be arranged. Don’t you believe in desire?”

  “Of course. My grandparents went the length of China with everything they owned on their backs on the basis of nothing but desire. But I can’t imagine them looking to create desire in their relationship. Their lives were saturated with desire; they were looking to carefully, intelligently slake it. You see?” he tipped back his head and took a long swallow of beer. Behind him the orange sun had lit the length of the horizon, like wildfire.

  “Anyway,” he said, “romance bores me.” He raised his head regally, and waved his hand as if flicking something away. Then he smiled at me, paused a few moments, and said, “You will love my city.”

  OUR ROUTE WAS MISSOULA to L.A. and then west over the Pacific to Hong Kong. We went Northwest first class—huge, plush chairs, bowls of sherbet on china followed by tea every couple of hours. Liquor was free, so Min and I drank it liberally. Over the course of that night, including our long stopover in Seoul, we became tipsy and sober again three times as we drifted in and out of daylight.

  I was sure we would tear off the tips of the buildings as we descended straight into the heart of Hong Kong. Landing was intensely exotic, like swiftly entering a jewel, a ruby.

  Albert was there to meet us. As soon as Min saw his father, he grabbed my hand and we rushed through the crowd. When Albert and Min hugged each other, I noticed that Albert was hugging with only one arm. The other was slack at his side. He’d apparently had a stroke.

  Min pulled back. “Dad,” he said, “are you all right?”

  “Oh, yes, only a small accident. It’s healing rapidly.” He continued to pat Min on the back as he turned to me. “And you must be Sarah. I’m always honored to meet
a friend of my son’s.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  Moments later I was in the soft leather backseat of Albert’s silver-blue Jaguar, passing under the electric canopy of Nathan Road, breathing in the scent of the city, which was—in equal parts—diesel exhaust, rank mango from the pyramids stacked on the sidewalks, and the keen salty air that rose off the Pacific.

  We passed through the tunnel to Hong Kong Island and drove down a quiet street lined with inverted pines, stopping at a dark-blue, turreted restaurant. Over dinner I discovered that Albert, like Min, was a curious, gracious man with a talent for asking personal questions that one might want to answer. Albert and Min got along well. As they talked, I studied their faces.

  They looked alike, though racially they were obviously not identical. Albert, I knew, was pure Chinese. His family had once been refugees to Hong Kong from Manchouli, a northern city in Manchuria province, close to both Mongolia and the Soviet Union. Min’s mother had been from a tiny mountain town in the Himalayas, above Nepal. I wondered how that would be, to be a father and to stare across a table, through the crackling candlelight, and see your own face, younger, broadened and transformed by both time and race. How interesting it would be to see the future that precisely.

  Albert lived in Kowloon, which is on the mainland, so we passed back and began our steady climb upward, out of the lit city, into a dark, densely wooded area on the periphery called Clear Water. The house was green and sprawling, overlooking a small back of the South China Sea.

  All around us rose small, jagged mountains. In the dark they looked alive, like giant blackbirds, staring down at their one treasure—the little sapphire bay.

  MIN AND I HAD a week before we began our jobs. We set out the first morning in Albert’s Jaguar. Once downtown, we roamed on foot. The first street we stepped into was steep and lined with small stands selling slices of snake to eat and the bodies of fish that supposedly had been drawn from the ocean decades ago, in the 1950s. This was a delicacy, and if one ate it carefully, it would give a specific sort of knowledge, the fish-seller said, knowledge that all desire is one day satisfied. “Why?” Min asked.