Free The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau Page A

the street to the Astrid, their conversation loud and animated, and as usual Hakma is talking about Kurdistan. The incarnation of injustice, what the Turks do to us, he says. You just don’t understand. Has he ever been there, someone asks, one of the stragglers, obviously, someone who does not yet know this question’s inadvisability until he asks it. Yes, says Hakma, and his parents were born there, and his parents’ parents, and their blood is his blood, and almost everyone, except for the person who asked the ill-advised question, starts to pay attention to other things, because this is the conversation they have every week, fueled by injustice and rounds of drinks.
    The room starts to whirl ever so slightly from the edges, left to right, and Jonas focuses on a knot on the wooden tabletop, only to watch it move slowly to the right, along with the rest of the room, and he has to move his eyes to keep up with it,but he can’t get the timing right and his eyes slip past the knot, then move back to try to focus on it again.
    Of course
you
understand me, Hakma is saying;
you
are my brothers, my sisters, my comrades against evil, my long-odds risk takers, my fellow freedom fighters. He is really going for it, trying to impress the inapt questioner with the nobility of his plight. Jonas remains silent for much of this conversation. Hakma looks over at him occasionally; they all do, as though looking for permission, or affirmation. Jonas has never spoken directly of his childhood to any of them, but people hear things, divine things from what is left unsaid, and it is widely believed that he holds the trump card in the suit of injustice.
    Across the table, Hakma grows louder. They don’t get it. Nobody gets it. He raises his voice to a level that seems very loud, but for all anyone knows may simply be appropriate. They have no idea what his people have suffered, goddamned Turks, and he no longer looks around to see whether any of
them
might be present. The uselessness of NATO, and Europe, and America, America the cowardly, America the impotent. They don’t know, can’t know, can’t understand. And then someone comes over, someone big, with a backward baseball cap and very white gym shoes, comes over and tells him to be quiet, to shut the fuck up, and there’s some shoving, and the room spins again, and then they’re grabbing their coats, and they’re hustled out into the yellow-lit street.
    Someone has the idea to go to another bar. A better bar. A cooler bar. This bar is loungier, big chairs, low tables, and Jonas sees that the trumpet player they saw earlier is at this bar, and it’s a small neighborhood, so he’s not really surprised to seehim there, tall and skinny and wearing a captain’s cap, and his music is playing over the sound system, the same music they had all just heard, but perhaps because of this it strikes them as a thin echo of what they heard live. He knows the bartender, this musician, and they are in the midst of an animated conversation about the music, both of them bopping their heads in time to it.
    They all sit down and order beer and resume the conversation, injustice and power, but like the music, it is all getting old for Jonas, thin, and before long he says he’s going home. What he really wants to do is go back to Shakri, collapse into her. He gets up and puts on his jacket. Hakma grows quiet. They all shake hands and exchange loose hugs. Trevor drifts off with another friend, and Hakma is left at the table by himself.
    Jonas turns around to leave, pulls his coat collar up around his neck. The door opens and he rides out into the cool street on a current of warm air and plaintive trumpet. Once he’s outside, he looks back in through the bar’s big picture window, and sees the image he will tell Shakri about the next day, while he sits with her sipping tea.
    The bar’s canned light spills out through the window and onto the street, so it’s a little like looking at a giant TV screen.