The 14th Day Read Online Free Page A

gloom settles over everything in the room. Vaniok listens to the distant sounds coming from the street, sounds of people who don’t have to think about these kinds of things. How lucky they are. Jory, meanwhile, is caught up in his own thoughts. After a moment he pulls himself up. “But I told you about my jar of soil,” he says, “and I haven’t shown it to you. Here, come to the desk.” Vaniok, who’d actually forgotten about it, follows Jory across the room. He slowly opens one of the drawers and extracts a glass jar like the kind used to hold preserves back home. Vaniok can see the dark earth inside; the earlier excitement returns. Jory brings the jar to Vaniok and slowly undoes the lid. When he pulls it away, the sharp smell of the homeland’s soil rushes from its container and Vaniok’s eyes sting.
    â€œPut your hand into the jar,” Jory urges softly and Vaniok does so. The yielding earth is surprisingly cool, Vaniok’s fingers disappear in the blackness. For long seconds neither of the men speaks. Oddly, no sounds from the outside penetrate the walls of the room. At last Vaniok withdraws his hand, carefully brushing the last grains of soil back into the jar. The silence lengthens, Vaniok waits while Jory closes the cover and turns to put away his container of earth. But even as he does so Jory stops, frozen for a moment, as if he’s forgotten what he set out to do. Bent over the jar, his back to Vaniok, he asks, “Will we ever go back there?” The words are barely audible, it’s not clear whom he’s talking to and Vaniok is surprised by the despair he hears in this voice that until now has been so insistent on their return. In the angle of Jory’s back Vaniok senses the man’s vulnerability and he’s suddenly embarrassed, as if he’s glimpsed some secret Jory hasn’t wanted him to see—it’s as though in this instant he’s looking at the real Jory. The hair on Vaniok’s arms bristles.
    In a moment, though, the other man has put away the jar, closed the drawer of the desk, and he’s facing Vaniok again, apparently his old self once more. “Another drink, maybe?” he asks.
    Vaniok shakes his head. “I really have to be going now,” he says. “But thanks for inviting me. Thanks for the drinks. I know you’ll like it here.”
    Jory walks him to the door. He’s not as cheerful as he was earlier but his cordiality seems genuine. “Thank you for coming,” he says. When he closes the door Vaniok makes his way quickly down the stairs and is glad when he’s finally outside.
    â€œJory is very quiet, very reserved,” Ila says. “A man of mystery.” Vaniok and she are having coffee at an outdoor restaurant and he watches the students passing by. They wear shorts and light shirts in the unseasonably mild weather, and walk with loose limbs, smiles on their faces as if they expect to meet only people who like them. Vaniok tries to imagine he’s one of these students, bright futures dancing in his head, visions of parties on the beach where people who will be your friends for life gather around the fire and sing.
    â€œHe’s like the farmer in the sea shell,” Ila says. The two of them are speaking in the old language.
    Vaniok is brought back to the present. He remembers: Ila has been talking about Jory, who’s been here little more than a week. “Farmer?” Vaniok asks. “What farmer?”
    â€œIn the story, silly. The farmer in the sea shell.”
    â€œAh, that one.” His grandmother used to tell him the folktale about the young man who’d gone looking for the ocean in a sea shell and had lost himself in its cavernous whorls.
    â€œI can imagine many women might think they’re the maiden whose whisper calls him out.”
    Vaniok laughs. “He goes around like a man with indigestion.”
    She laughs too but only to be