Sunday's Silence: A Novel Read online

  Praise for Sunday’s Silence

  Named as “One of the Best Books of 2001” by the Los Angeles Times

  "Exquisite . . . Gina Nahai looks at snake-handling from the inside, and the cliches of Appalachia slough off like old skin, revealing the fright and the awe that make extreme Christianity so potent. Because Nahai is not interested in sensationalizing such extreme religious notions, Sunday's Silence demands that we pay them attention and lets us understand a little better their powerful lure."

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A bold, passionate tale of fanaticism and seduction. Sensitively and vividly rendered. Exotic, mythic ... a tale told by a Scheherazade . . . parts of the tale told on different nights, each fascinating in its own right, each contributing to the story but also telling more than the story needs. Nahai lays her story of a strange folk and the enigma of charisma against a background rich in history. Sunday’s Silence is an ambitious and entertaining novel that will please fans of Nahai’s novels. It could also win her new readers.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Sunday’s Silence is exactly the kind of book that Americans need to be reading right now, a book in which East and West collide, not only in war but in love. Nahai writes equally well about these two worlds, both beautiful and cruel, both filled with serpents real and imagined. The novel is a testament to the fact that even at our strangest we are not so different, that at our strangest we are most alike.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Gina B. Nahai has set her third novel in a world that is exotic, terrifying, and endlessly alluring. [She] has the ability to deploy the telling detail, to write ... a marvelous sentence . . . passages that contain a wonderful, authentic rhythm.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Astonishing ... a searing romance, a spiritual quest, a compelling tale. Myth, history, faith, love and desire crash into each other and burn throughout Sunday’s Silence but it is the interplay of all of these with fundamentalism that drives this lyrical work. Nahai’s true achievement [is to] dig deep into the heart, soul, and—perhaps most difficult—the psyche of Christian fundamentalism at its most extreme. Sunday’s Silence is an eloquent look into the heart of belief, into hearts of darkness and hearts of light.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A literary tour de force ... A novel of powerful magnetism . . . An accomplishment worth celebrating. Nahai skillfully weaves the tangled separate stories of her characters, and she does it as effectively as Faulkner did years earlier with the hidden lives of his characters.”

  —Denver Rocky Mountain News

  "Haunting . . . Nahai’s dreamlike story beguiles with its depiction of a world where worshippers drink strychnine to prove their faith. Home, we learn, still casts a powerful spell.”

  —People magazine

  “In the tradition of Southern writers from Faulkner to O’Connor . . . Nahai captivates, filling her stories with characters and multivoiced narratives that rival those of her earlier works.”

  —Los Angeles magazine

  “Unusual and enthralling. Nahai deftly explores the enigma of charisma. Most intriguing is the author’s highly stylistic treatment of the question of faith versus fanaticism and the notion of fear as the strongest motivating force for those who seek salvation.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Valuable for its illumination of fanatical faith and for its revelation of cultures . . . Nahai’s Appalachia is a place of isolated beauty, crushing poverty and appalling ignorance. Here, the holy rollers breed faith by fear, demanding members handle snakes, drink strychnine and plunge their limbs into fire as piety tests.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “Faith versus fundamentalism, fear as a motivating force for seeking salvation . . . Nahai explores the enigma of charisma, opening a window on an insular world and rendering the ‘other’ America explicable.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Gina B. Nahai

  Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

  Cry of the Peacock

  Sunday’s

  Silence

  A Novel

  Gina B. Nahai

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

  New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Washington Square Press Publication

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2001 by Gina Barkhordar Nahai

  Published by arrangement with Harcourt, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Harcourt, Inc., 15 East 26t^

  Street, New York, NY 10010

  ISBN: 0-7434-5945-8

  First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing April 2003

  10 98765432

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Listen,

  I will tell you a story you will not easily forget—one you cannot turn away from, or deny, or leave behind in the folds of my hands and on the edges of my lips.

  It is the story you have searched for all these weeks, the one you resolved to uncover no matter what the cost to yourself or others. You have traveled the world looking for an answer only I can reveal, and now you are here, armed with a long-ago fury that has cooled and hardened and turned into rigid certainty, seeking the truth, intent on proving it to the world.

  You have come to destroy me—you who can save me with your silence. You have come to destroy me, and all I can do to absolve myself is to offer you my words as I have offered you my skin, to take your hand and guide it over my memories as if they were my flesh, as if I could seduce you with my tale instead of my passion.

  Is Truth more urgent than DesireI

  So come closer. I will show you what you have wanted to know since the beginning of our time together. For when I am done, you will believe that which seems impossible to you now—that you and I are one and the same, regardless of all of our differences, that you cannot undo me without destroying yourself, that hearing my story has made you—my confessor, my judge, my enemy—it has made you my accomplice.

  Listen.

  Summer 1975

  SHE WENT TO find him when he most longed to see her, walked through town in her white cotton dress and her bare feet, and all along the way men stopped and stared at her as if to wonder if she were not a figment of their imaginations. Adam sensed the men’s agitation before he became aware of Blue’s presence, heard the murmurs of their hearts and their faint, embarrassed gasps as she traveled past them like a breeze in the heat of the two o’clock sun of a Sunday afternoon in August. Then he recognized the stirrings of an old sadness, felt Blue move toward him with the beat of his own breath, and by the time he went to the door and saw her, he knew he should never have come back.

  She looked like rain.

  She stood before him with her purple eyes and her innocent’s smile, a storm of golden-red hair against her tulip-white skin, her body long and lean and unself-conscious, her arms bare and cool and hinting of desire—and he realized that he knew nothing about her at all, that he had spent days investigating the woman without gaining the slightest understanding of her.

  “I wanted t
o see you,” she said.

  They stood in front of the Lamar-Church Boardinghouse in downtown Knoxville. An old colonial mansion built on one of the original sixty-four lots that had comprised the city in its early days, the house had been abandoned for close to forty years—victim of the urban flight that overtook Knoxville after the Great Depression and that lasted well into the mid-1970s.

  For forty years the house had sat, unoccupied, along a deserted street, its windows smeared with dust, its steps crumbling with age and covered with kudzu. Around it the city had slept in shells of empty department stores and locked offices, houses overrun by colonies of mice and giant cats, cobblestoned alleys frequented by naked ghosts and orphaned children, railroad tracks that transported only freight cars, and a station where no train ever stopped. Then the city’s leaders had embarked on a plan to invite life back into its center. The boardinghouse had been sold for a pittance to the first and only bidder, and money had been loaned for a renovation. Investors had been invited to take over stores and businesses. Streetlights had been installed. The train station had been revamped. A year after it had opened its doors, the boardinghouse was still among only a handful of buildings that held a semblance of life downtown.

  That Sunday Adam shared the hotel with three other guests—college students from Amsterdam on a year-long crosscountry tour of the United States. One of the boys had heard Blue come in and was now standing at the window of his room overlooking the street. Even without turning to see him, Adam could imagine the look of stupefaction on the boy’s face, the way his eyes watered as they strove to swallow Blue’s image whole, the way he whispered to his friends “come-to-the-window-and-look-for-yourselves-this-is-definitely-a-sight-to-see, the-one-we’ 11-remember-when-we’re-old. ”

  Adam had been in Knoxville for ten days already. He knew where to find Blue, of course. She had lived in the same house in Fort Sanders since she had moved here from a far-off and exotic land twenty-four years ago. Her husband, a man everyone knew as “the Professor,” had brought her here with no fanfare and with little explanation of her background. In Knoxville the last few days, Adam had followed Blue’s trail around town and talked to people who knew her, looked up her records at the county courthouse and the DA’s office, searched the archives of the local press for references to Blue and her past. He knew he had to call on her—to look her in the face and determine for himself the truth or falsehood of the rumors surrounding her. Yet every time he came close to seeing her, he was overcome by an instinctive sense of danger, a feeling that he would lose objectivity the moment he set eyes on her, and so he had kept his distance, from hour to hour and day to day, until she made the first move.

  “You’ve been asking about me,” she said.

  The smile had spread from her lips into her eyes, and spilled like heat onto everything she looked at. Adam watched the edges of her mouth, the soft dimple in her right cheek, the curve in the nape of her neck. Her dress, cut at the top in the shape of a V, was almost transparent. Through it he could see the bareness of her breasts, the line that ran from the center of her chest down over her stomach, the tips of her hipbones against the sheer fabric. She was like a creature from another world, he thought—a child’s drawing of a woman, all those vivid, improbable colors, the red and purple and blue that belonged more to trees and to fish than to humans. She must have picked up a box of crayons, he thought, once when she was three years old and her world was filled with promise, picked up the colors and painted herself into what she thought a woman would look like.

  Blue shook her head to move the sun out of her eyes. Her hair fell in long, soft curls onto her back and shoulders, reflecting a thousand variations of light, giving her an aura of unreality. She walked closer to Adam and out of the sun. At the second-floor window, the trio from Amsterdam inhaled uneasily and remained glued to their spots. Aware of their desperation Blue raised her eyes at them for a split second, acknowledging their presence, accepting their eagerness. Then she looked back at Adam.

  It occurred to him then that she was not afraid of him at all, though she must realize why he was here—because he had read about Little Sam Jenkins’ death and come back to investigate how he had died, because Sam may well have died at Blue’s hands—he had said as much to the sheriff in the hours before his death—because Adam was determined to establish the truth or falsehood of that claim.

  She came even closer to him and stopped. He thought he could feel the warmth of her body spreading under his skin— like water moving through the earth, finding every pore, filling a long forgotten but excruciating need.

  She was not afraid of him at all.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  The INSIDE OF the boardinghouse was dark and dim and full of shadows. Blue led Adam through the narrow hallway on the ground floor, the Dutch boys staring at her from the landing above the staircase. The hotel’s owner, a transplanted homosexual from Michigan, had sensed the boys’ excitement and came into the hallway to check its source. A costume designer by training, he had come to Knoxville in the late ’60s to help the university set up its first theater arts program. He had counted on staying a month, maybe two. But the green of the Appalachian Mountains and the calm of the wide Tennessee River flowing silently through town had seduced him. The contrast between the humid Tennessee weather and the harsh, hard earth of Michigan had been soothing, and in the quiet, abandoned downtown of Knoxville he had found an anonymity that was comforting. Now he ran the boardinghouse and applied his talents to collecting small glass figurines which he displayed on every flat surface in the downstairs living room.

  Blue went up to the man and took his hand. He smiled at her—a daring, knowing smile offered only to her, and withheld from Adam.

  “How brave you are, my dear,” he whispered, pointing out Blue’s near nakedness, the heretical way in which she had let her hair loose and her feet bare. Among the Holy Rollers of southern Appalachia, women who showed their flesh, who cut their hair or dressed in immodest ways were considered Jezebels, damned by the church and shunned by its members. Holiness women wore floor-length dresses with long sleeves and no adornments, tied their hair back, refused to wear makeup or jewelry or even a watch. Until recently, Adam knew from his conversations with the townspeople, Blue had respected the conventions of the church and never flaunted her beauty, nor displayed her flesh and skin, as she had done the last few months. Then Little Sam had died and she had left the church and, with it, all the laws that had governed her outward appearance.

  Watching her now, Adam thought that she was indeed brave—that this was what she had in common with the hotel’s owner: they were both outcasts from their own tribes, rebels with little left to lose, alone but for the friendship of other fallen angels.

  The owner gave Adam a sharp, disapproving look, then stepped back and let him among the colored glass.

  The living room wallpaper was cobalt-colored suede. The floor was dark wood. The chairs were covered with yellow and red velvet. The table tops and mantelpiece displayed luminous shapes of animals carved in glass. Standing among them in her diaphanous white dress, rays of cream-colored light falling on her through the half-open shutters, Blue looked every bit as fragile, as light and magical as the glass.

  She walked to the middle of the room and turned to face Adam. Her dress gathered around her like a puddle of white, setting off her purple eyes and revealing only her bare feet. She waited for Adam to come in, but he remained at the threshold-reluctant and cautious and aware of the dangers of getting too close to her. He stood with one shoulder against the frame of the door, at once intrigued and alarmed, drawn to and repelled by her. His body—tall and lean and indifferent—retained an old and almost forbidding tension. He still bore the frame of a man who has spent his formative years working outdoors, but he looked older than his thirty-nine years, more jaded. His face was broad and angular, scarred on the left cheek from one too many childhood beatings. His eyes, light brown like his hair, rested on Blue but
refused to let her in.

  She saw this and smiled.

  “I’ve seen you watching my house,” she said.

  Her voice was rich and languid and laced with temptation. It spilled off her lips and into the lazy heat of the room, spreading itself against the air that was thick and heavy and still, settling onto the backs of the glass horses in the proprietor’s collection, into the loops of the white embroidered linen on the armrests, the petals of the roses in the red-and-blue Persian rug.

  “I see you asking questions of Mrs. Roscoe across the street. I hear you talking to my friend Anne Pelton in Pineville.”

  She had caught him off guard, upset the balance in which he was supposed to be the hunter and she the unsuspecting prey. Still, she did not seem hostile.

  “I watch you from my bedroom window. You wait for us— my husband or me—to come outside, but you never knock on our door.”

  Adam reached for a cigarette in his shirt pocket and lit it. He knew this woman’s game, he thought. In his years as a reporter, he had seen others like her—offenders with their backs against the ropes, aggressors who suddenly found themselves trapped, who realized their only chance at escape was to convince the opponent that they were harmless.

  He blew a puff of smoke, watched it dissipate in tiny loops the color of Blue’s voice.

  “I’m working on a story,” he said, his voice deeply detached. “Nothing personal.”

  She smiled again as if to say she knew better. He felt angry with her, dissatisfied with himself for having let her make the first move. He had to take charge of the situation, he thought, establish himself as the one in control.

  He flicked the ashes from the cigarette onto the hardwood floor, inches away from the silk fringes on the Persian rug, and did not bother to hide them. He came into the room now and sat on a chair next to a bureau.