The Fall of Saints Read online

  Years later, alone in my bed at night, I would go over every word uttered; examine every gesture and facial expression; recall the stories and the laughter, trying to find a piece that would point me to the Lucifer among the angels who celebrated my marriage to Zack that night.

  2

  I quit my job at O&O, at Zack’s suggestion. He was a citizen, so I no longer needed the firm as my path to a green card; I was making peanuts, and he was making tons of money. Besides, we wanted to start a family: I might as well rehearse the life of a stay-at-home wife and mom. I spent my days taking care of Zack: preparing his meals, ironing his clothes, cleaning and tidying a house that needed no cleaning, there being only the two of us, except of course when we had company, but on such occasions we would hire extra help. Bored in the daytime, I looked forward to our evenings in the quest for a baby. We went at it with gusto. Every night. Really, lovemaking is great, but it is greater when pleasure combines with purpose.

  Zack often made business trips to Estonia. On those occasions, I didn’t find staying at home alone much fun. Zack had set me up with a stash of money in my accounts, and to relieve the boredom, I would immerse myself in visits to Manhattan department stores and shopping malls. After a time, the novelty wore off. During the day, I felt like a Hollywood star, with all the glitz and glamour that comes from money. But at night, enveloped in a strange emptiness, I felt like a piece of wood. Zack once told me that after the collapse of communism and the return of capitalism in Russia, the wives of the nouveaux riches would spend days buying designer outfits and then selling them in flea markets as a way of easing their boredom. At times I felt like one of them but without the courage to dump my stuff on the flea markets of the Bronx and Manhattan. A pattern emerged: In the daytime, the credit card kept me company, and at night, good old gin and tonic. An expanding waistline resulted.

  I was irritated to find that, after a few weeks, I could not fit into the clothes I had bought. I joined the All-Purpose Fitness Club in Riverdale, where I worked on my body with yoga, weight lifting, and biking. It was not much excitement. Then I discovered that I could achieve the same ends with the more fun-filled kickboxing. When I grew bored with that, I enrolled in Krav Maga martial arts classes. Krav Maga was not your elegant judo or aikido performance: it was rough and brutal. To my surprise, I found myself warming to the blood rush.

  I was never one to keep up with events in Kenya, but now, with a lot of time on my hands, I would browse Kenyan newspapers online, only to be met with the comedy of politicians defecting from one political party to another or a politician forming several political parties. Some moments I thought long and hard about the family I never really knew. I wondered what life must have been like for my mother, pregnant with me in her teen years, banished from home, and forced to cut ties with her siblings. I resented the fact that she seemed insufficiently angry with my absentee father or with fate. For me, coming to America was like an escape from a social void, an absence of feeling that I belonged to a unified family and place. Zack was the nearest I had felt to an identity I had chosen. Nothing could fill his absence when he was in Estonia.

  Melinda helped me kill time with stories: a lot about her work as Black Madonna and Black Angel but very little about Meli Virtuoso, the financial analyst. Her work schedule was flexible; she had no problems rearranging it to suit me. We always found things to do together, shopping, mainly. Shamrock was the only place I could not bring myself to go, despite Melinda’s constant invitation to be her guest. It was sacred to my union with Zack, and I could never go there without him.

  She invited me to her church to hear her sing as Black Angel. She told me that many visitors—the “Jesus is my savior” type—flew all the way from Africa, South Africa, and Kenya to hear the gospel music. There was a Kenyan lady reverend who came to the church in the belief that the choristers were real angels. She insisted on meeting one of them. Melinda offered herself and kept up the illusion that her voice was a direct gift from angels who came to her by night. There are too many crazy reverends, I thought.

  Zack had told me that once, in Estonia, he met a Kenyan woman bishop on a mission to convert people from communism. Completely unaware of the fall of the Soviet empire, she had an elaborate moral scheme to smuggle her Christian converts into the West and wanted him to join her.

  When Zack resumed his routine between Edward and Palmer during the day and Riverdale at night, we were back on the social circuit and to our nightly quest. And what nights! It was as if each touch whetted our appetite for more. He kissed me, slowly and everywhere, each night working me to new heights from which I would descend into an incredible free fall. Years into our marriage, my stomach still tied itself in knots at the thought of how each night would bring new ways to satisfy our mutual hunger. Tenderness in wildness.

  Except that our quests did not bear fruit. Whenever we felt like we had created life, I would buy a self-testing kit, with the same result. A year of fruitless quest took its toll: At night, purpose took over from pleasure. Bedtime increasingly became a time and place of anxiety. The real blow came when a visit to my gynecologist and a battery of tests revealed that, for some reason, I conceived in the tubes, not in the womb, and life would not stay. Childlessness was threatening my marital bliss. I contemplated surrogate motherhood, but Zack was against having another woman carry his seeds. It was me or nobody. It was flattering, though not a solution to my desire to have his baby.

  Joe came to the rescue. Among the men who came to the wedding, I liked Joe the best. We hit it off right away. Stocky, medium-sized, with a scar across his face, he loved cigars, women, and fast cars. Zack seemed to rely on him more than he did the others. He was at our place one evening when we poured out our hearts to him. He shrugged off my inability to have babies and suggested adoption. I don’t know why we had avoided thinking of this alternative. After Joe left, we continued turning it over, and by the time we nodded off, we had agreed to adopt a child.

  Zack suggested Kenya, the land of my birth, as the source, and I was very moved. But would Kenya give us a biracial child? We wanted a baby who reflected our racial identities, and as long as it fulfilled that condition, we did not care where it came from, Africa or America. Through Melinda, Mark suggested the Kasla adoption agency, in Chinatown, claiming that it was known to meet needs such as ours. Zack and I filled out numerous application forms; he handled the whole thing and told me when Kasla had sent a copy of the dossier to the agency’s sister company in Kenya. Zack often told me not to judge a book by its cover. For example, Mark’s scowling face hid a kind heart.

  Zack revived the offer of house help that I had rejected soon after we moved to Riverdale. I hired Rosie, a tall, robust plus-size Ghanaian. I gave her good wages and saved her from having to do three or four jobs. It was not entirely out of charity. I wanted somebody who would be there for me and the baby. It turned out to be a good investment. Rosie entered into the spirit of the moment and supported my hopes. We whiled away the time with gossip and stories. Her own love life was sour: all the good Ghanaian men were taken. Life for her was work in the daytime and loneliness at night. Rosie would never hear of dating someone who was not Ghanaian, least of all a white guy. Love between white men and black women was not true love, she said. “It’s more of a mutual curiosity,” she claimed, following up the assertion with a loud laugh that moved her chest up and down. “It has worked for me,” I countered, “and for me, Zack is more than a curiosity, he is hot.” “Well, yes, you are the exception to the rule,” she said, “mostly it doesn’t work,” though she never cited a personal experience.

  In no time Rosie became the sibling I did not have in Kenya. I told her how I came to America, an eighteen-year-old who had never left her Ndenderu home in Nairobi, and entered Worcester State University in Massachusetts, where an African was indeed a curiosity. On my first walk outside the campus, I ran to the first black person I saw in the streets who told me that New Yor
k was more multicultural. I was not disappointed: At City College, I didn’t have to answer questions about a country called Africa, or explain that I had not played with elephants as a child or that we did not live in trees. Rosie had encountered similar questions, even in New York. Our stories of survival, working several jobs here and there, dreams of having an extra dollar to buy ourselves a tiny luxury, were similar, the difference being that I had landed a wealthy husband.

  Lost in our life stories, Rosie and I must have scrubbed every corner of the house twice or three times over.

  One evening, almost a year since we had started the process, a social worker delivered a beautiful two-year-old boy to our door. I would have preferred to fetch him but Zack had assured me this was okay too. My eyes were so glued to him that I hardly noticed the messenger; I left it to Zack to deal with her.

  He had big round adoring eyes, and I loved him the minute I saw him. His brown skin was a fine balance between white and black. The paperwork said little about his background. His parents were not known; he had been left at a church entrance and taken to the police and then the agency. Judging from his given name—Kobi Yusuf—he could have been born in Garissa or, more likely, Mombasa. American navy soldiers had been training there for years. We toyed with giving him a name from both sides of the family.

  Zack’s family history, like mine, was complicated. His grandmother was estranged from his grandfather. She brought up Eha, Zack’s father, single-handedly. Holding Eha, then seven, she had hidden in the forests to avoid the fate of the tens of thousands of Estonians hurled into railroad cars and deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan during the Soviet occupation. Mother and son escaped in a small boat to Germany and finally to the USA, among the early Estonian immigrants.

  Eha grew up in the Bronx and later married Edna, an Italian American schoolteacher. A year later, Zack was born to an absentminded father who spent his days mulling over the fate of his own father, whom he never met. Eha spent entire summers traveling in the US and Russia, diving into archives and libraries, examining this and that record, and asking questions. Failure only whetted his desire to know: Searching for his family became an obsession that intensified with years. In search of his lost family, he neglected the living family.

  Then Eha stopped his quest and never mentioned his father’s name again. He took to the bottle as if hiding from himself or from whatever he had encountered in his final visit to his homeland. Eha died six months after Edna succumbed to breast cancer. Despite his disgust with his father, Zack may have inherited Eha’s obsession to dig up the truth of his past. He told me that although he always went back to Estonia for business, he also wanted to know more about his grandfather. He never forgave his father enough to want to name a baby after him.

  My relationship with my father was one of equal absence. My mother, who raised me, was always vague about him, how or where he lived, so I took it that he had abandoned me. I met him only once, in his office, when I turned eighteen, right before I left for the US, and there was no time to unravel the mystery. Why should I reward him by naming my son after him? In the end, we decided to keep Kobi and turned Yusuf into Joseph, in honor of Joe.

  Kobi seemed unfazed by the new environment, as if used to sudden changes. I wondered about all the hardships he had gone through that I would never know. Though it would have been good to know his family past for medical purposes, the absence of known facts was a blessing. I could own him completely. His history would be the one we would give him.

  You should have seen Zack and me claiming that he already looked like one of us, till Rose laughed and said that he would soon acquire both our features.

  “Haven’t you seen how spouses in time acquire each other’s looks? It is the same with children,” Rose said, an observation that reminded me of David’s story about the twins.

  I gave a party to introduce Kobi to Joe, Mark, and Melinda, thanking them all for the role they had played in the adoption process. Mark protested that he had done nothing to deserve the gratitude, but Melinda stopped the game spoiler with a kiss, saying they were always with us in flesh and spirit. Really, Mark did not know how to let others appreciate his generosity, only his ferocity.

  Kobi was somewhat aloof at the start, but I had expected this. I knew I would win his trust and his love. I wanted to be a good mother to this child, as my mother had been to me, and I could see that Zack was equally committed. Kobi took over my life. I hardly noticed Zack’s absences.

  Though he still traveled, whenever he was home, Zack spent a lot of time with the boy. I enjoyed watching them play soccer or football in the yard. Sometimes they were too engrossed in Frisbee and flying kites to notice me. Melinda joined me a few times and insisted that Kobi had an uncanny resemblance to Zack. “Good,” I said. Rosie’s observation was confirmed when, on another occasion, Joe found me playing with Kobi and said that he bore an uncanny resemblance to me.

  Everything I had made me grateful to Zack. Yesterday I was an illegal immigrant. My mother was dead. My father had denied me. My womb would not carry a life. Zack had given me a home, a country, and a child. In return, I inwardly assured him of my devotion. I made sure he had the privacy he needed and kept Kobi away from his office down the hall from the kitchen. It was the least I could do.

  A few years later, with the blood and tears of agony flowing all around me, hope and deliverance precariously resting in the Kenyan police force, I would wonder whether it wasn’t a higher order that made me break my pact with myself to stay away from Zack’s office.

  3

  Actually, a rat gave me a reason to finally enter the office. Even before Kobi came into our lives, Zack kept his office locked. I had never needed to enter: I always saw it as the space he needed for himself. After all, I had my little space—which I hardly ever used or locked—and we had an office where we kept papers of common interest. But the little unwelcome guest broke my routine. For a whole week, the creature played tricks, entering at times and in places of its choosing. Sometimes Rosie and Kobi would join me in the chase without success. So I called the exterminators.

  Zack and Kobi were out for a drive. The office, which I had left till last, was immaculate. Everything was in its place. A rat would never find something to eat or a corner to hide. I had it fumigated all the same. After writing the exterminator a check, I went back to the office to ensure that everything was back in place. A piece of paper stuck out of a file in one of the drawers. I pulled the file with the intention of retrieving the paper, but instead, the entire folder landed on the floor. And with it, a gun.

  I held the thing in my hands briefly: It brought back memories of my brief moment at the shooting range and the encounter with the gunman at Shamrock. Zack obviously had the same love affair with guns as all Americans. I was afraid of guns and quickly put it back in the drawer. More worrisome were the scattered papers, reminiscent of my first encounter with Zack. He might well think I did these things on purpose.

  I started to assemble them. As I did, I saw Kobi’s name and a phone number on a piece of paper. I shoved the scrap in my pocket and put the folder back in place. Flustered, I closed the door and went downstairs, and retrieved the piece of paper from my pocket. Besides Kobi’s name and a phone number, there was nothing else on the piece of paper. I paused. The number did not ring a bell. I flipped the piece of paper. Nothing on the back. What had the number to do with my son? Was it the adoption agency’s? Or . . . could it belong to another woman? Curiosity aroused, I picked up the phone, not sure what I would say. Then I put it down. Better to use my cell phone. The number I dialed was currently not available, said the answering robot.

  “What is wrong with me?” I muttered to myself. Zack could have been talking about Kobi and scribbled down his name in the process. I felt bad for suspecting Zack of secret telephone liaisons with another woman. He had never given me reason; he had been very open about his affairs before we married, including his
stint with Melinda. I had kept my relationship with the man from Ohio to myself. Zack and Melinda had maintained a healthy relationship of mutual respect and friendship. I had erased mine with Sam, not even opening his emails.

  Boisterous noise downstairs alerted me that Zack and Kobi had returned. I put the paper in my side drawer, tucked under some other stuff, and went downstairs, a little flustered at my furtive behavior.

  “Hi, Mommy, did they find the rat?” Kobi asked when I joined them in the kitchen.

  “No, they didn’t but the poison will get him.”

  The next day, after I dropped Kobi off at school, I went upstairs, took out the piece of paper, and scrutinized it. I saw some faint writing on the back. I held it against the light, then walked to the window, squinting really hard.

  What in the world was Alaska E-S? Zack had never talked about Alaska except in connection with Sarah Palin. I went downstairs and pulled out the directory. There were hundreds of businesses named Alaska. I looked at the paper again, determined to figure out what the other letters were. I could not make them out. Convincing myself that I was seeing a mountain where there was a molehill, I tore up the piece of paper and threw it into the incinerator. I laughed at my paranoia. So absurd. I put the incident out of my mind and resumed my family and social life, which amounted to a party now and then.

  One lazy Sunday, I woke up, my head pounding as if someone were inside it playing drums. Zack and I had drunk more than our fair share of alcohol at a party the previous night. I’d hoped that father and son could go to the soccer game without me, but a quick glance at Zack sprawled dead asleep on the bed told me I’d be going with Kobi, without Zack. Kobi was very proud of Dad and Mom as witnesses to his heroics. His team, Park Boys FC, was playing against the formidable Little Giants FC at Macombs Dam Park, across from Yankee Stadium. I swallowed a painkiller, drowned it with liters of water, and forced myself to pack some snacks and juice. I dragged myself alongside an excited five-year-old Kobi, strutting about in his cute little blue uniform.