Free Soldiers of Paradise by Paul Park Page A

biting her lips. The shadow cut across her face. I kept staring at her, trying to memorize her beauty. And she would glance at me and glance away, holding my hand so tightly she was hurting me. I reached out and took hold of her jaw, and pulled her towards me, and when I kissed her I could feel her tense, hard lips, and feel her teeth clenched tight beneath them. She let me kiss her on the mouth.
    I was with her the whole night. When it was almost morning, we walked outside into a snowstorm, to watch the snow falling out of a clear sky, the stars like chips of ice, and Paradise small behind the mountains, circled by a ring of ice. The thaw was over; it was the first night of spring, and the snow was coming back. Some little girls were throwing snowballs. I heard some music from the rooftops, fragile and sweet, a song called “children playing,” and when they heard it, the girls stopped and looked at each other as if confused, their arms at their sides. And one held up her wrist and stared at it, and turned it, and turned each finger in a movement so delicate, so expressive of the music, that it was as if another instrument had joined in, playing in a kind of harmony.
     

Part Two:
Among Strangers
     
M orning was making its first suggestions as the voice of the antinomial flickered and went out. Not a moment too soon, thought Doctor Thanakar, stretching his crippled leg out on the carpet, relaxing for the first time in many hours. The man’s story had seemed to require physical discomfort to understand, for whenever the doctor had relaxed his body he had lost the sense, so he had spent the night cross-legged, his back and shoulders stiffly hunched, his hands held out in front of him. It was as if sorting the narrative out from all the vagaries of music had involved tedious manual labor that could only be performed in that position.
    For at times while speaking, the antinomial would play on different instruments—gentle, interminable melodies without repetition or variety. Sometimes he would chant the words, or clap his hands between them, or space them so irregularly that it was hard to make the jumps. Sometimes he would sing, or talk in a dreary, inaudible monotone, and the doctor would have to strain to understand. In the dark warehouse, it seemed to him the voice illuminated the story as badly as a flickering candle would a book. Intermittently, though, the man had played a flute, and that had been enough to compensate. For then it had been restful to listen, when music was the end and not the means.
    Morning came in through narrow windows high up along the walls, and the doctor looked around. He and the prince had come there in the dark for entertainment, and at first, while the antinomial was singing, a girl had heated wine for them. She had burned a dirty fire, and he had seen her face and shadows in the empty space around them. Even when the prince was drunk, she had fed it for a while longer with handfuls of dung. But then she had gotten up and gone, the fire had burned out, and Thanakar had sat for hours, listening to stories in the black dark. Now, with the windows turning pink, and pink light playing on the walls, he was surprised to see the warehouse was full of people. Antinomials were wandering between the rows of mattresses, or sitting among piles of broken bottles, or lying wrapped in rags. He was surprised that they had made no noise, required no light. And he was anxious to see them there at all, though none paid any attention. None had yet approached the remote corner where he and the prince sat on a shred of carpet.
    The girl, though, had returned sometime in the night, and was standing motionless quite close to him. She was dressed in a coarse shirt of unalleviated white, rolled up to the elbows and open in the front, so that he could see the hairless skin between her breasts. Her legs and feet were bare. It was a pose too frankly immodest to be stimulating. He had friends who came down nightly to