An Anonymous Donor

I.

     I keep my rhythm like the black girls. My blue skirt flies, but just high enough. I know Ryan can see, and so I keep going and pretend like I don’t notice. I am thirteen, and I know I’m just beginning to look good, but I will wait a year or two before I let Ryan know I love him too. We have plenty of time—I am going to marry him! I am going to marry him, so it doesn’t matter so much how I treat him now. My head bounces with the jump rope, and I see Ryan in the corner of my eye, laughing and pushing with his friends, and he always looks over at me. I know my long brown waves make him look over. Every time I’m in the air my hair just floats there for a second and then it snaps softly to its ends and follows me down—Do the double daisy! No, wait! Three-four... sittin’ in a caddy with my lov-er-shu-gar-dad-dy—Mikayla, so did your mom say you can come to my birthday—an’ Miguel was all like whatchu mean, an’ I’m like whatever ese—I love those ones! I saw those exact same ones on her music video, and I like totally begged my mom and she totally bought them for me I can’t wait to wear them. I’m going to wear them next Wednesday to Mass!—And I am keeping my rhythm and it’s the perfect end of the day. It’s Tuesday. I know the bell will ring any second, but it’s October, and it’s sunny, and I’m holding this exact minute right now, waiting, and I feel the sun and then brrrrinnnnng! Watching, feeling the exact second. Looking at the blacktop just before the bell. Each little bump and crack, with the light going diagonal across it, each one is its own little world. You can just stop everything and look down at that one little rock, and with its big shadow you could live next to it. And jumping up and down with the rope, doing something but at the same time you’re just jumping and doing nothing and looking around at the sun and the blacktop and the monkey bars, it’s the best thing. I grabbed my bag from where it was against the red brick wall next to the basketball court. I run off with Gabi and Julia, and we were like three white squares floating above three blue triangles—You totally like Ryan! Por que no? Por que... he like totally likes Mikayla. Everyone knows it. Whatever. He’s just pretending. He doesn’t really like her. You just saying that because you like him, Aida! And you know that gringo muchacho ain’t never gonna be with you—I shrugged and I hardly even hear them. I didn’t answer because I know I am going to marry him, so he can take his time making it obvious. It’s such a beautiful day— Mama used to say that, I just barely remember right before I forget it. We are going to wait and be pure until we are nineteen and we get married. I don’t know if other people can see it. Or feel it. The warm sun in the air, like orange jello, holding everything still for a few minutes in the afternoon at the beginning of school. It feels so sad and beautiful. Maybe I’ll make chimichangas for Daddy tonight. We walk down the hill past Park and Sixth and down to Naito Parkway on the river and by then Gabi and Julia have gone to their buses. I don’t take the bus, except on the really rainy days. I walk all the way home by myself, to southeast twenty seventh.
Over the bridge, looking down at the river between my legs through the metal crisscrosses, and then at the cracks in the sidewalk.

II.

Timur Ogonovich Belikov was first noticed for his classic wrestling physique when he began attending School No. 62 in a village in the shadow of Mount Elbrus, in the Soviet province that would one day become the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. It is a body not unlike a seal’s—the neck a seamless extension of the occipital plate at the base of the skull: sloping, corded, the muscle humps downward, packing onto protean shoulders and flowing and thinning as it tapers toward the brick-like hands—a body made to grasp, but intractable and impervious to advantage.
For fourteen years before coming down to the village school, Timur had lived among his father’s brothers and cousins in the highlands skirting the border with Georgia. There are staircases and battlements in the hills of that land that were ancient when Mohammed’s followers encamped against them. These same hills kept the Nazis at their zenith fifty kilometers at bay, a fact which is noted by a monument at the point of their farthest reach. There is no memorial to Generalissimo Stalin; the land still creaks with his weight.
The mountainsides on which Timur’s people grazed their goats, comprising an amorphous forty kilometer swath, are little populated. Timur, being the youngest of the four surviving sons of his father, spent much of his first decade sitting silently with the goats. He would recline against a rock wall warmed by the declining sun under an overhang, and gaze out over the precipitous valley for hours without moving. In the summer, he might hear only the sounds of the wind over dry grass on rock and the bleating of goats for weeks or months at a time.
The task of slaughtering and dressing the goats fell naturally to him, and he was dexterous and unflinching. He had lived in intimate proximity to many of the animals since their birth, but it seemed to him that death was the natural end of goats, and he never hesitated when the time came. In the ancient tradition of his people, which pre-dated their conversion to Islam by centuries, Timur would take the heart of the goat and hold it toward the sun until it stopped beating. He would then bury it before cleaning the rest of the animal.  As he held it aloft, he would stare without squinting at the outline of the heart against the molten sun as it contracted in orderly waves, until it began to fibulate, gradually losing its memory of life, moving in spasm until it deflated and was still.
When Timur entered School No. 62, neither he nor his family expected that he would emerge more literate than when he arrived. The men of the family traditionally made their appearance in the village for a year or two, thus staking a sort of claim to being civilized herdsman in the line of their Muslim forebears who had conquered the region half a millennium prior. It had been understood by generations of headmasters in the village that the dark, monolithic forms that descended from the mountains to sit in the back of the classroom were part of the landscape: a cultural heritage, and not students to be cajoled, reprimanded, or taught. But when a new teacher arrived in the village, fresh from Moscow, he took it upon himself to draw Timur out. The teacher, Yuri Pavlovich, was a flushed, porcine socialite who was fond of tea and vodka in the afternoon, of sitting in the teachers’ small lounge and sweating. In the autumn of 1979 he stood before his classroom.
“You! Answer me. How does козёл decline in the dative?”
Timur’s mind returned to the classroom from where it had been roaming on the hills that leaned over the village. He stood, his hands behind his back, dwarfing Yuri Pavlovich even from the back of the classroom, and slowly repeated the one line of Russian his father and uncles had taught him before sending him down to school.
“YA-NI-PAN-NI-MAY-OU-PA-RU-KI.”
The classroom erupted in laughter, which made Timur smile self-consciously. Yuri Pavlovich, assuming that he had been mocked, marched to the back of the classroom and rapped Timur twice about the head with a meter stick. Timur tilted his head to the side and looked at Yuri Pavlovich. He watched the little man, who sputtered underneath his chin.
“You-you... animal! You come down from your hovel, and you laugh at me? I, who am come from Em-Ge-Uu just this year! To your little village, to fix what your Mama and your Papa have broken? You— (Though the linguistic forebear of Timur’s highland language diverged some four thousand years ago from the the proto-Indo-European group that would give rise to Russian, and though it has more in common with Mongol and Korean than it does with Russian, common words are often cognate across the languages of the world, and so when Timur caught amid the unintelligible Slavisms a reference to “mama” and “papa” his reticence was breached.) He grabbed Yuri Pavlovich’s right forearm, snapping the ulna, and then, with a blow from his mallet-like hand, landed him unconscious on his back.
Ten minutes later, Timur stood before Nicolae Gegorovich, the headmaster of School No. 62. In the headmaster’s small office sat also Boris Shmelkov the athletics coach and a swart Balkarian student who lived in town and spoke Russian.
“What’s your name?” (The headmaster waved the back of two fingers in the direction of the student, who translated.)
“Ti-mur, son of Ogono Belikov...”
“That’s fine. Timur—tell him—Timur... you know that your behavior could land you immediately in a place very far away?” Timur’s expression did not change. The headmaster agitated his cigarette skillfully above a small bowl, so that the ash streamed evenly and unhurriedly down. “And Timur... be sure I care nothing for Yuri Pavlovich or his broken bone. He should have known better. But the officials at the center for our Youth Behavior might see the matter in a different light.”
Timur shifted slightly in his seat but still made no response.
The headmaster examined Timur. He glanced at the athletics coach and continued. “What is more, do you know that in our gracious Motherland you are required to give two years of military service?”
“Da.”
“And... Timur, do you know that no man from your family has ever fulfilled this obligation?” Timur did not answer but looked stonily at Nicolae Gegorovich. “Timur, let me make clear—I do not want you to serve in our great army. We don’t need you there.” He leaned back, tracing circles with his cigarette around a light fixture on the ceiling. “We need your family tending their goats—our goats.” He paused and leveled his eyes with Timur’s. “And you... Timur. I need you for something else. I need you to wrestle for our school. And perhaps someday even our region. Timur, how does that sound to you?”
The headmaster leaned back and crossed his legs, awaiting Timur’s response. The coach’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two. Timur, for his part, knew even from his isolated childhood both the glory that wrestling brought in his region of the world, and the danger that his family would be in if their commonplace neglect of duty were made a matter of official inquiry.
“Fathers,” he began, inclining his head slightly and looking for the first time directly at Nicolae Gegorovich, “My family would be honored.”
“Kharasho, kharasho...Perhaps we will show Nalchik a thing or two, da? Well, Boris Shmetzeltov, you have your ogre. See what you can do with him.”
Back in the empty corridor, Boris and Timur walked together. The athletics coach was shorter than Timur, and he walked with his arms held out slightly from his torso. Boris wore a red jogging suit, a remnant of the days long past when he wrestled in Volgograd at sixty-six kilograms. Though the two did not share a language, there passed between them the the filial currency of shared competency. In inarticulate manly fellowship, Boris gave satisfied half-nods and half-chuckles toward Timur as they walked. His nebular cheeks, shining, and his bit of chin and his expansive forehead, lighted from above or below by the few bulbs, shone with an infernal glee as he led Timur down the passage. (And though he remains silent, his chuckles seem to echo louder and more distinctly as the two progress into the darkness.)
They pass between the sharp echoes of their footfalls and the muffled strident commands of teachers and the multitudinous voices of students through heavy pre-Soviet wooden doors and back to silence. They reach the end of the building, and the classroom in which Timur had sat. The students, without a teacher, and having witnessed the infraction, sit in their seats, murmuring quietly. They are Kabards, ethnic Russians, and one or two Balkar shepherds from other hillsides. When Boris Shmelkov and Timur enter the room, the whispering stops. The rows of silent children are kaleidoscopic; each wears some combination of the one or two complete sets of clothing that he owns, faded in a meticulous and symmetrical way by the fastidious care of the proud poor. Beneath their pants and dresses are legs contoured by lean muscle, toned by walking and by tea and two meals a day. They are expectant, poised, and Boris Shmelkov rises to address them: his eyes pass from child to wizened child and he stands erect in his crimson suit.
“Comrade scholars, children of our country and our Motherland. See before you a man-child. A hero who will bring to our village the honor of a nation. Timur Ogonovich Belikov—a titan!” Boris finishes with a shout, and grabs Timur’s wrist, and raises it high above his own head.  The students’ expressions remain unaltered, while their eyes, dark and ancient, burn and applaud. From the children rises a sound, invisible to the ear, flowing and converging. Coach Boris Shmelkov looks around the classroom wildly, his lips retracted in a half sob, half snarl... And moving as if from the beginning of time, a girl rises from the back of the room—a Kabardinka, she walks with the stately gait of her people, exalted cheek bones and straight jaw, in a cotton dress—and she approaches Boris and Timur. In her hands is a midsummer aster, pale and stalwart, which she has picked in the dew of the morning and placed in her notebook. She stands in front of Timur, the part in her black hair level with his breastbone, and she kneels quickly and puts the flower in his hand. She returns to her seat. Timur looks down at his hand, and then, mute and uncomprehending, places the the flower gently in his pocket—

III.

—a quarter century passes and he takes a utility razor from his sweatpants in a small and darkened room. Holding a roll of plastic sheeting above his head, he slices a swath downward to his feet. A sigh. He straightens up: a penitent on a stone pillar. He measures a wingspan of plastic, then zips the knife downward again, taking another square. Setting the remainder of the roll aside, he lays out the sheets he has cut on the floor, crawling backward on his hands and knees. His gut hangs, swaying, from a red sweatshirt now faded pink. He sits back on his haunches, and takes from his orange plastic tool box a dull silver roll of tape. He pulls off a strip as long as his arms allow, and then another, sticking the first lightly on his pants. Then he tapes the plastic sheets together.
Beep. Beep. He takes a phone out of his pocket and opens it. He reads the screen—EN ROUTE—and then he closes the phone. He sighs.
Next to the tool box is a white styrofoam ice box, and he lifts the lid. In the center of the ice he forms with his fist a crevice, and then he replaces the lid. He removes from the tool box several instruments and a metal bottle which is covered with condensation. Underneath is a file folder with documents in triplicate. He holds the papers up close in front of his face and stares at them, slowly, from side to side and up and down: “AIDA MARIA SANCHEZ, Female, 10/23/1997.” He places the tool box and the ice chest on the plastic sheeting, and walks out of the small bedroom to the front room. He stands in front of the window of the apartment, silhouetted in the dark room by the suffused light of the late autumn afternoon through the drapes: he is a walrus, huge and bestial. He leans and peers out of the window, without disturbing the curtains. Turning, he looks at his watch. He walks over to a small plastic radio on the kitchen counter. He turns it on, and Mexican music comes out. He presides over the music for a minute, his head bowed. He lowers himself on to a small wooden chair by a small table, and it creaks. He leans down with his head on his forearms on his knees. As he sits, he becomes a boulder next to the counter, shapeless. He breathes, heaving, and it is audible even over the radio.
      The music is hypnotic: one-two, polka. He thinks of his mother and his father whom he has not seen in twenty-three years. He thinks of a classroom, and a moment in it, and then later the cheers of his village, people living ordinary lives who revel in his greatness and then the men who offer a chance to travel, and to live—to live!—and, still decades ago, Plummer Park in Los Angeles where he first landed and being moved up to Portland and at night sometimes driving the car or “being the muscle” as they said. And then more and more and more and now this. And even in California wanting to go home (“But of course you may go home! You may go home whenever you wish. Naturally, we could no longer guarantee the protection of your family...”) A sound, wind, and a voice, dry and cool mixing with the voluptuous music, borne away accelerating to a cool seat high above a valley and far away from this apartment where he is compelled to be and wishes he were there, and wishes he could wake up and run down the path on the side of the hill to a small house and in it his mother, and hug her tightly around the waist and weep and weep and weep.
(Racing down the stairs and away from the dark apartment and the tools on the plastic, throwing the phone under the wheels of a bus and running into the sky like in a dream and cool sunlight and hills and sunlight green and bending grass.)
For a moment the dark boulder next to the kitchen counter is silent and still. The air in the apartment, which has been drifting and eddying in the rooms and the hall, congeals and is still. An infinite space of time is crossed. Then the boulder shudders and groans. Levitating, ponderous, it floats toward the front room, casting a shadow as it passes over the square of light on the carpet by the window, and it comes to rest next to the door. Its heaving ceases, and it is silent.
Below, a girl scampers lightly up the steps, a blur of forward motion in blue and white. A bag bounces on her back. Behind the door, in the darkness, waits an ogre: a triangle of shadow. The lock turns, and the door flies open, spilling the light and the warmth of the sun like water or blood over the carpet, illuminating and warming every suspended speck of dust, and every fiber of the worn carpet, and every atom within them.

IV.

“Mrs. Jenkins?”
“Yes?”
“This is Dr. Chiyoko.”
“Oh my goodness.”
“We’ve gotten the call.”
“Oh... Breadon!”
“Yep... so, bring him on in... Do you still have the procedural checklist we gave you?”
“Yes yes... I’ll call Mike and he can leave work and... oh my goodness oh my goodness... where did...?”
“It was an anonymous donor, a little girl... from Portland, I believe.  The donor team is flying down with it as we speak.”
“Oh, her poor parents... Thank you thank you thank you!”
“Not at all Mrs. Jenkins... lets get that little boy in here and get him taken care of. He has a lot of living to do!”
“Okay Dr. Chiyoko... I just can’t tell you...”
“I know. We’re all excited too.”
“Okay, we’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Alright Mrs. Jenkins, goodbye.”
“Bye.”