The Volunteer Read online

  ALSO BY SALVATORE SCIBONA

  The End

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Salvatore Scibona

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A portion of this book previously appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Scibona, Salvatore, author.

  Title: The volunteer : a novel / Salvatore Scibona.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046079 (print) | LCCN 2018047067 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525558538 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525558521 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Sagas.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.C53 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.C53 V65 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046079

  Version_1

  To Jennifer Sprague and Philip LeCuyer

  Contents

  Also by Salvatore Scibona

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Hamburg

  2010

  Part One: The Old ManChapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Paradise

  2011

  Part Two: The New CountryChapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Jenseits

  2029

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you—Nobody—too?

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  HAMBURG

  2010

  The boy wore a black parka, a matching ski cap, blue jeans, and sneakers; he appeared to be five years old; and he was weeping.

  He stood at Gate C3, Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel Airport, his padded arms limp at his sides. He was talking through his sobs—not shouting or pleading, just talking to one attendant after another—but no one could figure out what language he was using. It seemed, somehow, Polish. The hodgepodge dialect of a town that ten different empires had captured on their way to someplace else.

  An airBaltic flight had disgorged its passengers at a nearby gate less than an hour before. The flight having come from Riga, it may have been Latvian the boy was speaking. But by the time he materialized in front of the counter at C3 the plane from Riga had pulled away from the terminal and no airBaltic employees remained at the gate or anywhere else in the concourse. He looked up at the agents behind the counter, stating his case incomprehensibly, while two hundred travelers watched, mesmerized, waiting for Lufthansa 531 to Amsterdam.

  It might have been Lithuanian.

  Soon the boy was barely forming words at all; he only pointed in the direction of Gates C1 and C2. But the custodian for whom half a dozen Lufthansa employees and passengers began to search the smoking cabins and bathrooms, and to whom the airport intercom called out in German, could be found nowhere at the lower end of the concourse.

  “Je m’appelle Laurence. Comment t’appelles-tu?”

  “Ich heiße Elisabeth. Wie heißt du?”

  But no one could get him to divulge anything that sounded like a name. And some of the adults around him began to think that their solicitousness only aggravated his distress. Each question elicited less of a response.

  A nurse from Kazakhstan knelt at the boy’s side, petting his hair, but he persisted in weeping. The boy’s coat fit him poorly: the cuffs fell short of his wrists. Bits of batting poked out of several tears in its shell, which somebody had tried to mend with electrical tape. A Lufthansa clerk—whose age (about sixty) and whose vast, highlighted hairdo seemed to put her in charge—tried using English, Russian, and Dutch to extract a name. Yet to the Kazakh nurse it seemed the boy knew they were asking for his name, and in the nightmare of his present, his withholding the name was the only thing that tied him to the lip of the chasm into which he had slipped. He aimed a curving finger toward the labyrinth of the rest of the airport, as though in search of a misstep. He let the nurse hold his snotty hand. He led her and the clerk down the teeming corridor.

  A young American who said he was an EMT asked, “Would the boy like to breathe into this bag? Quieres hablar conmigo, hermano?”

  The clerk said emphatically, “No, he is Estländer.” But she was only guessing.

  The intercom repeated in English, “Terminal 1, a child in lost-and-found,” while the boy hustled along, incongruous: a body automatized with purpose, as though if you got close enough you would hear him ticking, and yet under his crooked hat his face was anarchic with spasmodic blinks and sniffles. The chest heaved in the little coat. The nurse tried to unzip it. She thought the boy must feel terribly hot. But he twisted away when she touched him. It was incredible that the head could hold so much liquid; he had been crying for so long now without a drink. The nurse and the clerk led him into the ladies’ room to get him some paper towels.

  After they came out, he wouldn’t let either of the women hold his hand. He snatched it back when they tried to take it, and pointed this way, that way, until they began to see he was not retracing his steps after all. He was groping in a maze. For a parent. And he didn’t want either of these strange women to help him. But he hoped they would stick around.

  By the snack bar, a woman from Holland sat on her bag on the floor—other travelers occupied all the chairs—and watched as the boy led the other women crisscrossing through the corridor. She wore a blue polyester overcoat, a silk blouse, running shoes.

  She was trapped like the others, following the boy everywhere with eyes wide, devout. But unlike the others she gripped the thing on which she sat as though willing her body not to get up. Watching. Watching.

  Her hair was shaved on one side. The rest was white.

  * * *

  • • •

  ELROY HEFLIN’S SKELETON had gained its final inch only as he was getting out of the prison in Los Lunas, when he was twenty-one. Then followed two years of raking hot asphalt in Kansas, Nebraska, Maine; stocking breakfast cereals in grocery stores; slinging heroin, crank; using; shelters or street sleeping; raw wind, the wet kind that goes through you like devil thought; dropping the junk cold, no methadone, no program; multiple antibiotic-resistant infections to contusions in the scalp; teetering through snow toward a shelter in a church, where in the dark entrance a stout figure raised its hands in seeming benediction and to Elroy’s liquor-twisted mind took the shape of his father—hope even supplied t
he old man’s face—until the figure resolved into a pink-faced rent-a-cop who snapped, “Keep out till you’re sober,” and shoved him backward toward the dark; then Elroy’s fist swinging right for the face, a crack to the bastard’s eye, a crack to the nose, blood on the ice like a taunt that made him kick the piggish body after it fell, making it screech and plead, shouting at it, “I’ll come in if I want to, nobody’s keeping me out”; followed by his second, longer prison bit before he joined the army, got a steady place to sleep, and his shit finally started coming together for real.

  Soon thereafter, he was assigned to an Office of Defense Cooperation attached to the U.S. embassy in Riga, Latvia, as the country prepared to join NATO. Those were great days. All the men billeted in a three-star hotel—an eighteenth-century palace recently renovated with Swedish capital—that the Red Army had used for fifty years as a barracks.

  His CO ate smoked trout on dense rye bread in the hotel dining room. “I want to give you some perspective,” he said. “Where do you come from, Heflin?”

  “Sir, New Mexico,” Elroy said.

  “Sit down. Where, Albuquerque?”

  “Sir, Las Cruces, a place called Ramah, another place without any name west of Vado in Doña Ana County.” The table was set for a meal such as people ate who never had to wash the dishes. Seven silver utensils, five pieces of china, a linen napkin, four glasses of different shapes, arrayed, gleaming, empty, with a blue tinge.

  The CO poured himself coffee. “Imagine a Russian base in downtown Albuquerque. Farm boys in Soviet uniforms are eating lunch at Lotaburger. You’re one of them. Your side won the Cold War without firing a shot. How do you feel?”

  “Cock of the walk, sir.”

  “And rightly so. But you better not act like it.”

  The local girls were going to dress slutty, the CO explained. Elroy shouldn’t let the other junior enlisted men get the wrong idea. His age meant the younger privates were likely to follow his lead. To the men, the outfits would mean, Come take me for a spin. To the girls, they meant, This is how a real European dresses, right? So hands off. The men were only stationed here for eight months. The Latvian girls wanted to get married just like anybody.

  That sounded all right to Elroy. He reckoned he had become the marrying kind. And within a couple of months he had a steady girlfriend on the sly. The look, the counterlook, the approach all came so easily. Not like at home. He was drinking with some of the men in the Old City, at a café on a cobblestoned street just wide enough for a fat horse. And the waitress brought them some strawberries and dinner rolls they hadn’t ordered. She wanted to practice her English.

  In bed she asked him, “How come you like my ear so much?”

  It tasted funny. She didn’t expend much effort in washing it. He had a little bit of the USSR right here in his mouth. It tasted of sweat, sebum, and lemon-flower perfume.

  “Twenty years ago,” he said, “they would have sent me here to rape you and burn down your house.”

  “Silly,” she said, turning the pages of a travel magazine. “We didn’t have a house.”

  He awoke in her one-room apartment to find her polishing his shoes with her spit and an old sock. More than once she offered to do his laundry. No thanks, he said. He shied from a woman touching his dirty underclothes, smelling his funks and dribbles.

  Dank wind, then sleet. A Sunday. He bought two umbrellas for them. They walked through the Art Nouveau district, and she pointed to the tortured stone faces in the cornice of the law school. They happened upon Mass in a Catholic church, and for a nasty joke they both took Communion, in spite of the sport of the night before. He did not know what the priest was saying, except, for the most part, he did know. Mass was Mass everywhere. He looked up at the bats hanging from the high timbers and spoke with the God of the place. He asked if he could meet her parents, but they were dead.

  Her name was Evija.

  He wanted to suggest she go more conservative with the makeup; however, he respected other cultures. Before the deployment ended, he’d got her knocked up. He wanted to get married, but she didn’t just yet. And through a subsequent chain of tactical decisions, each reasonable in itself but unguided by strategic vision, he found himself five years later, while stationed in northern Afghanistan, sending a third of his pay to a bank in the former Soviet Union for the upkeep of a boy he got to see about twice a year. And all the while Evija was going out on dates with a Russian theater fag, and writing Elroy emails about, Could she have his credit-card number? She wanted to take the kid on a cruise to visit Norway. He sought the advice of his new platoon leader—for once an older man, with judgment as well as training—about, Was it wise, because what if somebody intercepted the message and got his credit-card number?

  His platoon leader said, “Corporal Heflin, a fucking cruise?”

  He emailed her that he wouldn’t pay for the cruise. Then he didn’t hear from her for a few months. To force her hand, he stopped sending the money. Then, while back in New Mexico on leave, he got an email about, Due to circumstances in her personal life, Evija was moving to Spain; she would not take the child; her family wouldn’t take him either; and that left Elroy; so when would he come get the boy, Janis; and apologies for such a rush, but within the month?

  The army had just promoted him to sergeant. He had grown stouter, more savage. He sat before the computer in his father’s retirement condo outside Los Alamos, eating a plum. The plum had detonated in Elroy’s teeth and spattered his shirt with juice. He did not notice. He was leaking tears—of what? Of gratitude? He wanted them to be tears of gratitude, yes. And he laughed, free and loud. To the radiant screen he said, “I’ll be damned.”

  * * *

  • • •

  TWO DAYS LATER—without a clear plan as to who would look after Janis once Elroy redeployed, and with the boy’s immigration status uninvestigated, and lacking so much as an air mattress for him to sleep on—Elroy sat in his and Evija’s old haunt, a café on Stabu iela, waiting. He had the blond, small-eyed looks of the local people, and the waitress threw the menus down and shot a stream of Latvian at him. He replied with a phrase Evija had taught him to enunciate without slurring: “I’ll need a moment to think things through, if you please.”

  Evija was going to come in with the boy. Then what? Elroy didn’t know.

  His post in the café wings gave him both a view of the plate-glass vestibule, where patrons entered, and cover from the prying eyes in the main dining room. If his feelings had to come out now, let them. But they didn’t need to do it on a stage. He sat still, hands folded under the table, waiting. He had not slept on any of the planes or in any of the airports, from New Mexico eastward. Little rashes splotched his face. His eyes were parched from airplane air. His feelings need not happen on a stage. But if they came rocketing out of his brain stem and began to ricochet across the roof of his brain, then did it make him such a child if he wanted a woman there with him to not look away?

  He checked his watch. He had thought to bribe Evija with flowers, but whatever it was he wanted from her he couldn’t buy. Unless she offered it freely, he wanted no part of it. Pointing at the menu, he ordered a glass of seltzer, and when it came he crouched behind a potted ficus, poured some of the water into his hand, and threw it on his eyes and the backs of his ears. He sat up, composed, hoping.

  Every time he had gone to stay with Evija and the boy, Riga had grown cleaner, richer, with newer cars. The Russian stayed away when Elroy visited. Evija insisted that the Russian was a common homosexual who needed a girl to keep up the proper appearances, and that she had never kissed him on the mouth.

  She cooked potato pancakes for Elroy and the kid, who abhorred sour cream, applesauce, anything presented to him as a condiment. These are the kinks of habit that evolve into our permanent selves. Elroy, as a child, had always preferred to sleep under sheets tight enough to cramp his toes. This preference had led him t
o take comfort in the austerities of basic training—they break you down, they build you up again, faster, tighter—and he discovered he had a talent for the breaking down, a talent for forgetting. And then a talent for acting on the impulse to kill.

  The three of them used to eat on the balcony of her place. Evija called it “our place,” including Elroy and Janis. She had taught the boy English and spoke it exclusively whenever his father came, so the boy could practice. He hesitated too much with his English, both parents agreed. By some private rule, he spoke it only to the two of them, and always red in the face.

  In the café, Elroy was ordering a plate of chicken livers when a crone came through the vestibule, speaking in harsh tones to what seemed a trailing dog, though it was hidden from view by the low clutter of tables.

  The waitress went away. The crone looked down at a photograph and cased the room. And Elroy hit the deck.

  His ass remained in the chair, but his hands pressed the floor, his head bent below the table. The wood floor shone with varnish. He could not quite breathe. He seemed to have seen something without knowing it yet. The way you jerk back your hand from a hot skillet before you feel the scorch. He had shot between four and seven enemy insurgents without ever meeting the thoughtless fright of the present instant.

  At last, he forced himself to stand. The woman adjusted her frayed shawl, looking around. The dog behind her was Janis, struggling to pull over the threshold a roller bag made for a child much larger than himself.

  Elroy said in Latvian, “Madam?” and waved her over.

  Evija hadn’t come. She’d sent this emissary, this hag: in fact, he now recognized, her landlady.

  If the woman and Janis had had their way, the transaction would have taken fifteen seconds. She looked at the photograph—of Janis and Elroy nearly naked at the beach in Jurmala the year before—and told the boy to go sit at the table. But he had already approached his father and was climbing into the seat next to him.