Текст книги "Dogs at the Perimeter"

Автор книги: Madeleine Thien

Соавторы: Madeleine Thien
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

I had gone to see my family last night. Navin told me Kiri had started a new set of drawings. Aplysia, waving like a flower. One cell, two cells, or Aplysia its entirety, a wide creature billowing through the ocean. At the kitchen table, Kiri sat across from me and asked me where I was going. “To Laos,” I said. “To see Hiroji.” Morrin had given me two weeks of leave. In my son’s bedroom, I put my fingers to the globe, turned the Earth on its pedestal, and showed him the place. The names inscribed were in French. Cambodge, he read. Viêt Nam. Laos.

Kiri gave me a drawing to bring with me.

I touched the blue, waxy openness. “The sky,” I said. “Or maybe the ocean?”

He nodded. “It goes off the edge of the page.” At school, he said, they had been looking at images from the Hubble telescope. “See? Like a galaxy, and you can go forever but the universe, it just never ends.”

He looked at Taka the Old, who would be staying with them while I was away. When they left for Vancouver, Navin’s sister would come to house-sit. “This cat has a big nose,” he said, suddenly interested. “Like a rabbit.”

“You’re part of us,” Navin told me when I left. “We’re your family. We have to find a way.”

Now, the flight attendant hands out ice cream that we eat with spoons shaped like tiny wooden paddles. I pace up and down in the aisles, between one set of dark blue curtains and another. Nearly everyone is sleeping, heads turned to the side. Hours later, as we are lowering toward Vietnam, I can see the Mekong River, I see temples like patches of gold, the delicate crowns of trees, dry fields ready for the next season. I breathe it in, this landscape so like Cambodia’s, like a painting I memorized long ago, shade by shade, curve after curve. Gamboge, the colour, was named by Flemish painters some three hundred years ago, after my country, Kampuchea. Cambodia. Deep yellow, burned orange, saffron, the colour of the monk’s robes, of tigers and the petalled eaves of the Khmer temples. I can’t stop looking. I am trying to follow this path to its end, I am trying to continue by buying a ticket, pushing my bag through the X-ray scanner, folding myself into the impossible drawer of seat 23D, flying away from Montreal, through the rough turbulence that joins these continents. In Saigon, when we exited the airplane, heat came suddenly, thick and heavy. In the airport, I drank tea. I bought postcards of the south coast. Women in ao dai and women in slacks, men my father’s age, businessmen in polyester suits, the ones who had survived the long wars and now crossed and recrossed the sky, hurried past me. A juddering, unhappy plane carried me north to Vientiane, Laos, and from there I took a bus twelve hours over the mountains. A wet humidity enveloped us. I could not understand the language. Some Lao words drew images in my thoughts but most were puzzles to me. This country was so mesmerizing, the bus climbed up into the mountains, slowing in the high altitudes, descending through limestone valleys and supine clouds. There was a woman on the road with her worried chickens. Little children torpedoed baguette sandwiches through the windows of the bus in return for a few thousand kip. I imagined Kiri here. Where are you going? a woman asked me. I don’t know, I said. She smiled and smiled. I cried and no one noticed. I wanted to go home but this was as close as I could bring myself, floating by sea, floating in air.

The bus carried me to the ancient city of Luang Prabang, where I stayed for two nights, waiting, thinking. In my bare hotel room, I spoke to Navin. We talked about our son. Navin told me about the years in Malaysia, after his father had passed away, and he and his sister were left to raise themselves. He told me details that we had never shared before, afraid of pity or misunderstanding, unwilling to give meaning to the past. I fell asleep thinking of telescopes, microscopes. Galileo and his polished mirrors, how they carried, magically, more visible light to the eye, making the tiny things large, and the distant stars near. How they collapsed space and time. The next morning, I arranged a ride to the village that Nuong had described to me, a dirt road with fifteen or twenty wooden houses and two small restaurants. By then it was late February, almost three months since Hiroji had disappeared. I was let off beside the village temple and the truck driver, a boy in his late teens, smiled at me wistfully. It was Monday, late afternoon. When the truck heaved away, the rising dust hung before me. A tired light veiled the temple, which was painted red and gold, lush as a woman’s fancy dress, like a tirade against the brown landscape. I waited. This village was so small, news would spread within a few minutes that a stranger was here. I stood beneath a blossoming tree and children came out of nowhere to peek at me, and I wondered if I had been like this, Sopham and I, fascinated by the strangers on the riverfront, with all our lives ahead of us. My mother once told me that we are born, into the world, whole. Year by year, our heads grow crowded with too many voices, too many lives. We begin to splinter apart. We take in too much, too many people and places, we try to keep them inside us where the world won’t alter them.

This is what I saw then: a Japanese man wearing a light blue, pinstriped shirt, creased as if it has just come from the store, and dark slacks. He wore no hat, carried no cane, had neither glasses nor sunglasses. His loafers were scuffed. He was clean-shaven, thin in a ragged way, he walked well but slowly, his face was sun-darkened and deeply lined.

He came toward me, the same as I remembered but softer, older. Another man stood behind him, so alike in appearance, so different in bearing. It must be a trick of light, I thought, we are separating and merging, intersecting and dividing.

“Janie,” Hiroji said. “Is that you?”

My friend held me for a long time.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “You’re here.”

In James’s house, the walls and floors were built of wood and bamboo, the structure stood on wooden stilts, and evening light ran in as if through a straw basket. Hiroji’s brother had been living here for almost a decade. James was very quiet. He moved in the corners, he set a table for us but when it came time to eat, he went away into another room and shut the door behind him. Hiroji served sticky rice that came from a conical basket, and some kind of wild green whose name I didn’t know, and a clear, rich soup. He asked me about Montreal, and I told him about the winter, about Kiri and Navin, the things that had happened. I kept glancing into his face, trying to reassure myself that he was here. Hiroji was quiet and for long moments he stared awkwardly at his hands. He told me that he had been with James for a month, that when he found his brother, James had not recognized him. Hiroji had wanted to go home to Montreal but he didn’t know how and, at night, lying in bed, he was overcome by shame. “I couldn’t explain this,” he said, gesturing to the room, the closed door, the village, “and so I put off writing to you. I didn’t know how to begin.” In Laos, he said, one could abandon the past and become someone else. But to what end? He was lost here. His brother did not seem to need or want him.

Hiroji took off his glasses and folded the arms down.

“Is it really James?” I asked.

He nodded, meeting my eyes. “But now I’m here, and he’s here, and … there’s no way for me to cross the last few steps.” He smiled, embarrassed. “I had pictured things so differently.”

The village had fallen still. We finished our drinks and then Hiroji showed me the rooms upstairs. He offered me his but I wanted to sleep on the open veranda, surrounded by the humid air. He acquiesced.

“Good night, Janie,” he said, and then he left me.

Under the mosquito net, I heard the jungle that ran along behind the village and climbed up the mountains. It was the first time in many years that I’d heard those sounds and when I finally fell asleep, I felt protected because the jungle never ceased, there was no such thing as silence or purity, there was no such thing as an ending even though all my life I’d been looking and keeping faith.

In the morning, a thunderstorm came, threads of lightning connecting the earth to the clouds. When Hiroji went into town for supplies, James and I sat outside in the diffuse, changing light. A woman brought us coffee and sat with us. She was Khmer and we began speaking, in tangents and in drifting conversations, and eventually James, too, began to speak. The days and nights we remembered began to overlap. Afterwards, and in the days that followed, I wrote so many things. I did not know what I was making. Terrible dreams came, but I tried to let them run through me and reach the ground. I saw that they would always return, this was the shape of my life, this was where the contours lay, this was the form. Yet I wanted, finally, to be the one to describe it. To decide on the dreams that took root in me.

As I work, my son comes to me in my memory. Kiri names the rivers for me just as I once taught him: St. Lawrence, Fraser, Kootenay, Mackenzie, Yukon, Chaudière, Assiniboine. Words to keep him company, to name the world, to contain it.

James

Monday, February 27

[fragment]

The hills are a fading purple, already the colour of dusk. James Matsui knows these mountains well, they are visible from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, a once-elegant city that now sleeps with one eye open, like Cain dreaming of Abel. In October 1974, on a night when trails of mortar fire glint in the southern skies, James writes the last letter that he will send to his family in Canada. He takes the envelope to the Red Cross office and then he detours beside the river, the Tonle Sap. He is lost in the crowd. Couples brush past him holding hands, children strut along the boulevard, tall as peacocks, parading past the throng of beggars. They and he are surreal in the evening light, dissolving in and out of focus, strolling to the rhythmic boom of artillery fire. Around him, people giggle in response to the shelling, maybe to prove they aren’t afraid, or maybe because the long war has made everyone careless or shameless or easily amused. On the boulevard, young swindlers in military uniforms stop the traffic. He doesn’t like the look of them, not when the stinking, starving man letting them pass is their grandfather’s age, not when beggar boys swarm at their feet waiting for treasure. He can’t abide their rifles and their ammunition belts, their cheap, flagrant uniforms. This is a city about to fall.

That night he works the midnight shift at the refugee camp and in the morning, his driver delivers him home to bed. Sorya is there, in her slippers, twisting the radio dial back and forth, catching mostly static.

They married a year ago. Sorya’s brother, Dararith, had been a Red Cross doctor, a Cambodian doctor (James is in the habit of differentiating, and he finds it hard to break this habit). Sometimes the three of them would stay up late talking about the war, about movies and tv shows and rock music. Dararith was an average doctor but a brilliant singer. He used to serenade them on those long nights when they bunkered down to wait out the shelling. James and Sorya get by in Khmer and crusts of French and English. She is well read and polite and funny, but sometimes, lately, for split seconds, he knows that she wants to hit him, or fling something heavy at him. For his carelessness, the way the war no longer touches him. Sometimes he comes to bed and wonders why she’s there, what she wants from him, why she keeps her eyes closed when they have sex, why she makes him come so hard and almost bitterly, and then she rolls out from under him and leaves the room so that he falls asleep to his own solitary breathing. It’s this ridiculous war that drags on and on and gradually covers everyone in dust so that, in the end, it would be just a small step to crumble like the stone buildings and the once-paved roads, to accept the degradation.

The Red Cross had sent him to Saigon in 1971 but he couldn’t abide the depressed, strung-out Americans. His superiors said, Well, try Cambodia, so up the river he went, a boy on a barge looking for better company. And it was better for a while, especially when Dararith was here. Phnom Penh wasn’t as frenetic, it wasn’t so obviously a lost cause. But what was once intoxicating to him is now dreary, Phnom Penh is catching up to Saigon. The end is near and everyone who doesn’t know it is either a diplomat or a king. The barbarians are at the gates with their rubber sandals and their Chinese-made rockets and it’s useless now, worrying over the bombing runs, legal or illegal, even though he sees the damage every day, thousands crawling into the city with missing limbs and missing children, people mutilated by the Khmer Rouge or bombed into hysteria by the Americans. They appear like wraiths. He knows men who have thrown themselves into the Tonle Bati, even Dararith used to joke about it. Nothing changes, he used to say. We’re caught in an infinite war.

But he, James, is living off the fat of the land: a noble Red Cross doctor healing children who will be pushed to the front lines tomorrow, boys who, day by day, are learning to revel in their worst tendencies. Tomorrow, he could be in Bangkok. Today there was an old woman eating the bark off a tree, stripping ribbons from it the way his mother used to de-vein the celery stalks, and he didn’t have the energy to go home and fetch this old woman some sugar and chocolate, something from his magnificent store of abandoned goods, bequeathed to him by the fickle bureaucrats, expatriates, and socialites leaving Phnom Penh en masse. What would his mother say? She saw the war in Tokyo. She saw much worse than this. The black dust covers everyone, even the healers. Physician, heal thy self, but what he wants is to sleep for days on end and wake up in a tropical paradise where a compassionate Buddha smiles down on him and touches his golden fingertips to the dirt to remind James of what we are and what we must be, dust to dust, being to nothingness, and how we err in the pursuit of an existence more lasting.

“You never understood God,” his mother used to say.

He had teased her by answering, “Why is it that God always fails to understand me?”

The hours are passing. The smell of fried food wafts thickly in through the porous walls. Morning light shifts across the bed, across the walls, into his open hand. It’s so distressingly beautiful here, so deformed and alive.

–

Sorya tries to make the bed with him still in it. This, he knows, is her quiet way of telling him that it’s past noon and a man should not be so slovenly. He doesn’t like speaking Khmer in the morning, before breakfast, so he addresses her in English. Let me sleep a little longer. She brings him a cup of coffee and he feels like a wet-nosed boy home sick from school. Her fingertips smell of anise. He drinks, burns his tongue, and then he pulls her back into bed with him, strips her, fucks her, tells her to forget everything but him. He says this in English and she answers in Khmer. In the end they speak the same loop-holed language that says only a little and lets the big things slide through.

“James,” she had said when they first met. “What a serious name.”

She is clever and fearless, she married him for practical reasons, and she will never be completely grateful. She once said that war makes people say far too many things, good and bad, that they’ll regret in calmer times.

“But are peaceful days around the corner?” James had asked, wanting to provoke her.

“Sure,” she said. “Wars always end. Peace always ends. People get tired.”

Sorya doesn’t stay in bed past six a.m. What she does, he can’t imagine. The schools are closed and have been for months, so she has no job to report to.

He remembers the days they went to the discotheque, Dararith bought the beer but they gambled with James’s cash. Dararith steered the moped that ferried them around but usually James and Sorya had to walk home without him, picking their way through the rubble. Dararith, he pursued women as if they were keys on a ring, and he was always falling in love because his brand of affection was endearingly sudden. Sorya was glamorous with her black hair loose and her bare shoulders and calf-high boots, her market-stall clothing that she wore like high fashion. She carried herself like a girl who’d been to Paris, to New York, but it was all show. Television, she told him, on one of those awkward walks home, can be a gifted teacher. And books. She married James, maybe, for his books. Something to distract her while she waited for her brother to come back, but it’s been two years and it’s obvious by now that people don’t come back.

She doesn’t wear makeup anymore but her hair is still long. Unbrushed, it floods around her and it seems, to James, as if it eats the light and hides the things that no one says: I married you as a favour to Dararith, I married you because of the war, out of loneliness, out of fear. I love only you. They both think these things, they both hold themselves in reserve.

“James,” she says now. “It’s a good name but it doesn’t suit you.”

“King James.”

She pushes the covers aside, stands up. When did she get so thin, so melancholy?

“Don’t leave me,” he tells her but then he is suddenly embarrassed.

“I hate sleeping alone,” he explains and she turns, a half-smile on her face, a half-sadness.

The war was ending and he worked all the time. The storehouses were empty, he had no medicine, no needles, saline, or chloroquine, no bandages, no aspirin or dysentery pills. He patted shoulders, amputated limbs, blinked into the persistent heat, and turned his back on the worst cases. It was the cool season, supposedly, but his clothes were sweat-drenched by ten in the morning. In his gut was a feeling of panic mixed with the weight of inertia, he was light-headed and joyous and bitterly angry. The radio spewed bulletins from the war in Vietnam and the shaming of the Americans not only there but here in Cambodia and next door in Laos. Ask the diplomats – American, French, English – and this humiliation was everyone’s fault but their own. Ask the Cambodians what would happen next and they just shrugged and smiled their fatalistic smiles. James hoped it was the last time he would live in a place where no one carried any responsibility, where the days were predetermined by the hundred lives already lived, by a thousand acts of karma, by destiny that rubbed out other destinations. He was sick of this country and he would have left already if it weren’t for Sorya, that’s what he tells himself. But every day he goes back to the camps and the Red Cross shelters and feels strangely at peace. Ten years ago, he was smoking pot in a dive on Powell Street, coming home blinkered, but his mother and Hiroji, true innocents, never noticed a thing. When he gets high it reminds him of how the air burned his throat in Tokyo when he was small, how he was terrified of fire, and then the long journey by boat and plane and bus that took them to Vancouver where everything was green, where things were young and not skeletal, but still he was so fucking scared. Japan was finished, his father said, even the ground was poisoned but now, Now we go from fire to water, from the city to the sea. He had turned the words into a song, a nursery rhyme. His father had been a professor of medicine at Tokyo University, he had been a solemn, determined man, but the supreme effort of getting them out of post-war Japan had ruined his health. When his contacts in America disappointed him, he had turned to England. In the end, he settled for Canada. A year after they reached Vancouver, his father died, post-stroke, on a crisp, white bed in a Canadian hospital. James remembered the place well, the sharp, stingy smell of it and the squawk of rubber soles on the icy floors. Be brave, his father had told him, and all the while his kid brother had pressed his pink face against his mother’s skin and slept in ignorant bliss.

His mother had opened a dry goods shop on Powell Street and James had taken his first paper route, his first of many: The Vancouver Sun, the Province, the Sing Tao Daily. Hiroji used to lie on the mat in the back of the store and coo at them, and the baby’s cooing made James feel improbably wise. He was eleven years old when he told his baby brother that they would both be doctors, real professionals. Maybe Tokyo and his father had given him a taste for calamity, maybe he had inherited his father’s uneasy, chafing mind. He scraped through medical school, finished his residency. The Vietnam War was in full swing and he signed up with the Red Cross. When all hell broke loose, he preferred to be busy and not just standing around. Saigon was fine, but Cambodia is something else, manic depressive, split with contradictions. They take him for local here, a regular Chinese-Khmer slogging through the mud.

On the night he travelled from Phnom Penh to Neak Luong, he packed and unpacked three times, removing his camera, adding his journal. Removing bandages and adding chocolate and whiskey. Overhead, helicopters circled and he told Sorya, “Maybe it’s better if you come with me.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

He was on his way east and he realized she was right. Any day now, Neak Luong would fall to the Khmer Rouge. Probably he’d be shot by a sniper, or his boat would be shelled, or some hideous Communist maquis would poach him and serve him for supper.

“Write me a letter,” she said and they smiled because the postal system was a joke.

“Take this money,” James said, “and buy us two tickets for Bangkok.”

“Honestly, you want to leave Phnom Penh? This heaven.”

“Do you?”

She laughed. “All this time, I only stayed because of you.”

“Don’t joke,” he said, confused.

“Careful in the wild,” she said. “Don’t come home dressed in black, carrying an ak, and wearing rubber sandals. I’ll shoot you on sight.”

“I’ll come in a stampede of elephants.”

Her eyes teased him with restrained laughter. The foolish things he would do, the foolish dances he would perform, to make her laugh.

“In better days,” he said, “we’ll go to the sea.”

“Promise me.”

He saw the lines at the corners of her eyes, he heard something in her voice, a foreboding, a hopelessness he’d tried so hard to banish with bravado, with laughter. What other avenue was left them? Every day they were surrounded by corpses, women without faces, men without limbs.

“Yes,” he said. “I do promise.”

–

They were ambushed in the dark. The cruddy boat tipped right then left, and James had a crushing sense of déjà vu as black-clothed creatures lifted from the water and slithered into the boat. He wondered whether Sorya would open the cache of money he had left her, whether any tickets remained for Bangkok, whether she would stay or go. For a split second, before the first kick, he thought he was being sent to join Dararith in the afterlife to which all doctors disappeared: a haven of arrogant, self-pitying men, a fate worse than hell. But this wasn’t a joke. These creatures had no sense of irony. They beat him and he, a soft Canadian, was already begging for mercy after the first punch. So this is what blood tastes like, he thought. So this is what real suffering is. They threw him into a hold. He thought of his father, who’d had the good sense to pass away in a clean bed rather than down in the reeking underground, in the terrifying Tokyo shelters, and now he, King James, would pass away in the dark, sucked into the careless water. One day he would wash up, bloated and unrecognizable, onto the shore of a shitty country. He heard them shoot the boat driver. He cried harder as they threw the body away.

They kept him blindfolded all of the time. Once, when they took the blindfold off, they asked him to identify tablets they had found in his bags. The samples were pink, like cotton candy at the Pacific National Exhibition fair grounds, like orchids, a pink that seemed foolish and innocent in this burned, exhausted landscape. “These are vitamins,” he said. He answered them in Khmer and they said he was a spy and he said, “No, I am not.” “Where are you from?” “Japan. Tokyo.” “Where is your passport?” “Lost.” “Why are you here?” “To treat the wounded.” “The wounded?” they said, taunting him. “You mean the Lon Nols, the traitors?” He shook his head vehemently. “I treat the people hurt by American bombs.”

They covered his eyes and returned him to darkness.

With the blindfold on, he felt absurdly safe. They surrounded him: bare feet on the thirsty ground, rifles smartly reloaded, the smell of a campfire. He heard someone getting a haircut, the scissors stuttering like a solitary cricket. He heard a fire starting and water boiling, he ate mushy gruel with his hands, he itched all over from the ants in the dirt, his tongue felt cracked. Night and day, his feet were shackled, he had to piss into a foul bamboo container, he was constipated and everything hurt. He couldn’t believe it was possible to be scared so long, to have his heart solidify in mute fear, and yet to continue day after day.

Sometimes, in his fantasies, he sits at his father’s bedside. The blinds let in whiskers of light and he can see his father’s right hand curled on the sheet, the skin over the knuckles flaccid and pale. He finds the doctors loud and the nurses kind and nobody really looks at him, not even his parents. James tells himself it’s not possible to disappoint the dead. All that matters to the living is the living, that’s what he had tried to explain to Sorya after her brother disappeared: “This is war, not a game. If you have the chance to escape you have to take it. If I go missing, don’t sit around like a fool.” He had felt like a hero when he said this.

But why waste words? Grieving Dararith, she had barely seemed to notice him. She just sat in the apartment thinking and reading, cleaning, cooking, disappearing. She didn’t need his devotion and this independence, her strength, made him feel confused him and shiftless, it made him feel temporary, like an insect clinging to a drain.

Suddenly there were no more planes in the sky and no more shelling. They stopped moving around so frequently. The blindfold was removed and he found himself in a small, square storeroom, or it would have been a storeroom had there been anything on the shelves. It was comfortable enough. The floor had French cement tiles, dirty now, but the design had been lovely once. A short, efficient man came in to give him water, rice soup, and, unexpectedly, a piece of soap. Eventually, the man started to extend his visits. He sat down on the floor and asked James questions about Phnom Penh, the Red Cross, about the war in Vietnam, about food and music and religion, about his wife, about Dararith. They always spoke in Khmer. James would sit with his arms tied behind his back while the man probed him, as if his life story were a confession, as if the two were the same thing.

The man was reedy, dark-skinned, with a way of tapping his knee rhythmically with his fingertips when he spoke. He studied the ground with such intensity that James found himself looking, too, at the tiled floor, taking in the stranger’s soft hands, and then the Kalashnikov laid confidently between them, the barrel of the gun covered by the cadre’s Chinese cap, as if in a decorative flourish.

One morning, the man surprised James. He said, “Let me tell you about someone I once knew. A friend. I was studying at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Do you know it?”

“Everyone knows it.”

The man went on, “This was more than twenty years ago. I lived with another boy, a Chinese-Khmer from Svay Rieng province. Are you familiar with that area?”

“Of course.”

“You’ve been there?”

James nodded.

The man was impressed. “His mother had a petrol stand,” he said, continuing. “The father was dead. The boy, Kwan, drove a lorry and he would give me lifts around the city. He was raising money for his tuition and he worked all the time.”

The man’s face was passive and kind, and it reminded James, disconcertingly, of his mother. His mother, too, had many surfaces, but he’d learned to see between the blinds, behind the clean edges.

“Kwan was trustworthy,” the man said. His voice dropped, not quite a whisper. “Can I tell you that I trusted him more than the friends I went to school with? Those were lazy boys who never worked. Inside their empty heads they didn’t even understand the concept of work. I started to tutor him. He got up very early to drive the lorry but, in the afternoons, when everyone slept, I gave him lessons. He was quick. The thing about Kwan was, he was mute. He could read lips, he could adapt, but he never, ever spoke. I confess, I was fascinated by Kwan. Boys my age were malleable. We swallowed each and every lesson without chewing it first. But Kwan, he was apart. He kept his thoughts to himself and he kept his peace.

“When you first arrived, I was astonished. I said to myself, Maybe Kwan got an education after all! Maybe he paid his way to medical school and made himself a gentleman. I congratulated myself that I, alone, had recognized you.”

In the room, a mosquito buzzed at James’s cheek and he wondered how the insect had found its way into the locked room where there were no windows and the air was stale. It must have come in with the man.

“Are you Kwan?”

“No.”

Generously, the man extended his hand and hushed the mosquito away. “Can you be certain?”

James didn’t know what to say. Now there were insects thrumming nearby, in the ceiling corners they made a sound like a headache. Loose greenery was growing through hairline cracks in the wall, the colour too vivid for this room.

The man nodded, satisfied. “Keep your peace, that’s what I wanted to tell you. Just keep your peace for now.”

He gave James a new set of clothes, trousers and a loose shirt, faded black.