Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“So what nationality are you?” I said, after a brief silence.

“Eh—?”

“Well, if your mother’s Polish, and your dad’s Ukrainian, and you were born in Australia, that would make you—”

“Indonesian,” he said, with a sinister smile. He had dark, devilish, very expressive eyebrows that moved around a lot when he spoke.

“How’s that?”

“Well, my passport says Ukraine. And I have part citizenship in Poland too. But Indonesia is the place I want to get back to,” said Boris, tossing the hair out of his eyes. “Well—PNG.”

“What?”

“Papua, New Guinea. It’s my favorite place I’ve lived.”

“New Guinea? I thought they had headhunters.”

“Not any more. Or not so many. This bracelet is from there,” he said, pointing to one of the many black leather strands on his wrist. “My friend Bami made it for me. He was our cook.”

“What’s it like?”

“Not so bad,” he said, glancing at me sideways in his brooding, self-amused way. “I had a parrot. And a pet goose. And, was learning to surf. But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May—we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here.”

“Wow,” I said.

“ Dead boring up there,” said Boris. “Heaps of dead fish, and bad Internet connection. I should have run away—I wish I had,” he said bitterly.

“And done what?”

“Stayed in New Guinea. Lived on the beach. Thank God anyway we weren’t there all winter. Few years ago, we were up north in Canada, in Alberta, this one-street town off the Pouce Coupe River? Dark the whole time, October to March, and fuck-all to do except read and listen to CBC radio. Had to drive fifty klicks to do our washing. Still—” he laughed—“loads better than Ukraine. Miami Beach, compared.”

“What does your dad do again?”

“Drink, mainly,” said Boris sourly.

“He should meet my dad, then.”

Again the sudden, explosive laugh—almost like he was spitting over you. “Yes. Brilliant. And whores?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” I said, after a small, startled pause. Though not too much my dad did shocked me, I had never quite envisioned him hanging out in the Live Girls and Gentlemen’s Club joints we sometimes passed on the highway.

The bus was emptying out; we were only a few streets from my house. “Hey, this is my stop up here,” I said.

“Want to come home with me and watch television?” said Boris.

“Well—”

“Oh, come on. No one’s there. And I’ve got S.O.S. Iceberg on DVD.”

xi.

THE SCHOOL BUS DIDN’T actually go all the way out to the edge of Canyon Shadows, where Boris lived. It was a twenty minute walk to his house from the last stop, in blazing heat, through streets awash with sand. Though there were plenty of Foreclosure and “For Sale” signs on my street (at night, the sound of a car radio travelled for miles)—still, I was not aware quite how eerie Canyon Shadows got at its farthest reaches: a toy town, dwindling out at desert’s edge, under menacing skies. Most of the houses looked as if they had never been lived in. Others—unfinished—had raw-edged windows without glass in them; they were covered with scaffolding and grayed with blown sand, with piles of concrete and yellowing construction material out front. The boarded-up windows gave them a blind, battered, uneven look, as of faces beaten and bandaged. As we walked, the air of abandonment grew more and more disturbing, as if we were roaming some planet depopulated by radiation or disease.

“They built this shit way too far out,” said Boris. “Now the desert is taking it back. And the banks.” He laughed. “Fuck Thoreau, eh?”

“This whole town is like a big Fuck You to Thoreau.”

“I’ll tell you who’s fucked. People who own these houses. Can’t even get water out to a lot of them. They all get taken back because people can’t pay—that’s why my dad rents our place so bloody cheap.”

“Huh,” I said, after a slight, startled pause. It had not occurred to me to wonder how my father had been able to afford quite such a big house as ours.

“My dad digs mines,” said Boris unexpectedly.

“Sorry?”

He raked the sweaty dark hair out of his face. “People hate us, everywhere we go. Because they promise the mine won’t harm the environment, and then the mine harms the environment. But here—” he shrugged in a fatalistic, Russianate way—“my God, this fucking sand pit, who cares?”

“Huh,” I said, struck by the way our voices carried down the deserted street, “it’s really empty down here, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A graveyard. Only one other family living here—those people, down there. Big truck out front, see? Illegal immigrants, I think.”

“You and your dad are legal, right?” It was a problem at school: some of the kids weren’t; there were posters about it in the hallways.

He made a pfft, ridiculous sound. “Of course. The mine takes care of it. Or somebody. But those people down there? Maybe twenty, thirty of them, all men, all living in one house. Drug dealers maybe.”

“You think?”

“Something very funny going on,” said Boris darkly. “That’s all I know.”

Boris’s house—flanked by two vacant lots overflowing with garbage—was much like Dad and Xandra’s: wall-to-wall carpet, spanking-new appliances, same floor plan, not much furniture. But indoors, it was much too warm for comfort; the pool was dry, with a few inches of sand at the bottom, and there was no pretense of a yard, not even cactuses. All the surfaces—the appliances, the counters, the kitchen floor—were lightly filmed with grit.

“Something to drink?” said Boris, opening the refrigerator to a gleaming rank of German beer bottles.

“Oh, wow, thanks.”

“In New Guinea,” said Boris, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, “when I lived there, yah? We had a bad flood. Snakes… very dangerous and scary… unexploded mine shells from Second World War floating up in the yard… many geese died. Anyway—” he said, cracking open a beer—“all our water went bad. Typhus. All we had was beer—Pepsi was all gone, Lucozade was all gone, iodine tablets gone, three whole weeks, my dad and me, even the Muslims, nothing to drink but beer! Lunch, breakfast, everything.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

He made a face. “Had a headache the whole time. Local beer, in New Guinea—very bad tasting. This is the good stuff! There’s vodka in the freezer too.”

I started to say yes, to impress him, but then I thought of the heat and the walk home and said, “No thanks.”

He clinked his bottle against mine. “I agree. Much too hot to drink it in the day. My dad drinks it so much the nerves are gone dead in his feet.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s called—” he screwed up his face, in an effort to get the words out—“peripheral neuropathy” (pronounced, by him, as “peri pher al neuro path y”). “In Canada, in hospital, they had to teach him to walk again. He stood up—he fell on the floor—his nose is bleeding—hilarious.”

“Sounds entertaining,” I said, thinking of the time I’d seen my own dad crawling on his hands and knees to get ice from the fridge.

“Very. What does yours drink? Your dad?”

“Scotch. When he drinks. Supposedly he’s quit now.”

“Hah,” said Boris, as if he’d heard this one before. “My dad should switch—good Scotch is very cheap here. Say, want to see my room?”