American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [69]
At the bottom of the river there were hundreds of us, he said, swaying upright like underwater tombstones.
He said this is what they did to the disobedient.
Parvin looked up through the tiny holes in the burlap and saw the shadowy undersides of the two boats slide away on the surface of the water. For a moment, she expected to die there and decided to breathe the water. But then she changed her mind and decided not to die. She had no idea how she would accomplish this, but when she pushed her hands above her head she discovered that the string tying the sack had begun to loosen. She wriggled her hands through the loosening knot and then they emerged through the top of the sack. She wriggled and the sack sunk down to her feet. She appeared to be dancing underwater. Her black hair wafted weightlessly, like ink. It scrawled mad writing behind her as she swam up to the surface for air. She had no time to waste and she swam frantically, but always elegantly, to the far side of the river. There were times when she thought she was too tired to go on, but then she thought of Hyacinth and found strength and continued on.
Still, she could not understand why he had let her be taken away and drowned. He had handed her over to the men who put her in the sack. She had been too confused at the time to feel the full force of this betrayal, but she comforted herself now with the thought that he had done it as part of a ruse, that he had known that the string would disentangle. She could not go on swimming unless she believed this. She could not believe anything else.
What she did not know as she swam was that Hyacinth had given the men the string and that the string had been given to him the night before by Avedis. She did not know until later that during his experiments Avedis had created a rope that looked strong and invincible but which in fact would loosen and dissolve in water. She did not know that Avedis had called for Hyacinth in secret and had given him this string to rescue her from the Sultan. She did not know that Avedis had done this because he loved her and because he knew that she loved Hyacinth.
As she approached the shore she grew weak. The dark water began to lap into her mouth and she could not prevent herself from swallowing it first in sips and then in mouthfuls and then in great and deadly gulps. The land was a dark green mirage that kept slipping up and down, in and out of the water, in and out of her reach. Suddenly she felt that she might die here in the water.
She kept thinking of the last time she had seen Hyacinth, when he handed her over to her murderers. He was standing very still and she could tell now as her head lifted and sunk that he had been frozen with the terror of losing her.
They were driving and it was the dead of night now. In the middle of the night they were speeding across the vast and unknowable country. Then the sky went white and he saw a hole in it like a cigarette burn. He would miss this bed, he thought, it would be hard to leave. He would miss this woman, this night. He would be leaving soon, he knew that now, he could not stay any longer. He was grateful to have had the chance to give her something, but he could not fight for himself. This is what I have been running toward and away from, he thought. This hole in the sky. He could picture himself wriggling through it, ending up on the other side, like some character from a silent comedy or a cartoon strip, always getting into scrapes and miraculously out of them, endlessly emerging from the brink of disaster. But he could not stay here, in this hospital, in this world, any longer. It was impossible. He had used up all of his earthly means of escape.
He looked at the wall with its wide expanse of soft white skin and its subtle shadows changing in the light. He pictured vividly that it would still be here tomorrow, when he was gone. And the pillowcase, he could see the corner of it out of his eye, against the wall, like the collar of a man’s shirt against a woman’s neck. He could use the pillowcase. He would shred it. Not