—
Muhidin.
Her father.
This absence was the worst of all.
Ni shi shei? the oceans cried.
An answer stirred just out of her hearing.
* * *
In the evening, the two of them sat together on the stone bench beneath the ancient willow tree. There were clouds. The distant bay was shrouded by mist. Ayaana laid her head against Lai Jin’s. Surrendering to the unknown. Not asking for more than the present. Dinner was oyster porridge with rice and dried seaweed, served with instant noodles. They spoke of worlds they knew, books read; they spoke of the sea and some of the puzzles of navigation. They spoke into the early dawn, before they remembered they ought to sleep.
* * *
—
Later, she wandered into the shower, where the water was pouring over his body. She said he had become thin. She asked him if he remembered their storm. “Every day,” he answered. She said she wanted to taste the water on his mouth, and his eyes, and the scar on his body. So he asked her if she would stay in China. But she did not have an answer yet. She watched him turn off the shower water. He was aroused, erect. She watched him dry his hair. She watched him tie a towel around his waist. She watched him and waited, and he asked her again if she would stay. She said, “I don’t know.”
“Come here,” he said.
Slow, small steps to the waiting man.
* * *
—
Exorcism. Scraping her heart and skin bare of the stain and shame of an other with an other. Disarticulated. So she could choose what spaces to include as part of her other selves. He woke her up to ask if she would stay, not for him, but for the sea, and he used her wakefulness to bring her into his body. Sharing ghosts. And then he told her the pale brown of her eyes was a map to a galaxy. And she remembered that her mother had already seized for her Orion. But he was calling her “Haiyan,” his name for her. It would always be so, and she knew now that Haiyan had something of the sea in it. She was listening to him, absorbing him, storing him so that when she must she would pull the memory of now from the shelves of time. And when his fingers traced her body inch by inch, soft as down, she dissolved and floated away. When she dreamed he was still there, watching over her. When he roused her because the glow of dawn was on her naked form, he had been at once mesmerized by the riddle of a curved human shape, this female being, and how and where the light stroked it, and stayed on it by way of his still ravenous body.
Her lidded eyes only half open, a sad whispering. “I cannot see who I am.”
“With me?” He was distressed.
She at once turned to cup his face; she pressed him to her. “This nation. I am not its Descendant.” And she rested her head against his.
Crumpling of space.
Of unformed imaginings.
Syntony.
He whispered, “You will be leaving.” Statement of fact.
Disentanglement, she thought. It is a word that looks like what it proposes. Yet the ache of leaving was already a stabbing sob within her, and then she hoped he might protest and ask her to stay so she could imagine trying that. But he was silent, and therefore, so was she.
“Tears?” he asked, turning his face so the tip of his tongue could dip into the salt on her face.
Speechlessness and morning shadows.
Streaks on two entwined bodies.
* * *
A dog-eared, folded timetable indicated that the last train to Xiamen on Monday would be at 8:37 p.m. Lai Jin had escorted Ayaana to the station in Hangzhou. Their progression had been awkward. Still shadowboxing. The previous day, they had argued, not about the shape of the desire that engulfed them, hurling them into and out of each other’s arms, but about the meaning of words. He had not expected to dread her leaving. The fear disguised itself as exasperation. “What do you need?” he had erupted, his fingers in her hair, tugging. She had rebelled: “How can I know?” Her tone was lacerating. As was their way, they skulked into their coves of silences until the flaming undercurrents threw them together again. Quickly, mouth to mouth. Wordlessness again. Breathing, and opened. And that silence spread within them, swirling, flowing, ebbing, and dragging them down to the ground as their sparrows roosted in the eaves. Crooning. Listening. Feeling herself drowning in clearer waters, her core being transmuted, and she succumbing, Ayaana twisted her body away, thrashing for a surface, fleeing the man; she went out through the door and into the evening. She breathed the cool air and looked back at the lighthouse. There was a man looking down at her through a window. She stared right back at him with everything she felt written out in her eyes: How can I know?
* * *
—
He kissed her again and again, and this time did not ask, “Will you return?”
* * *
—
The last southward-heading train of the day. It was already 8:15 p.m. The two people sat on a stained steel bench, their bodies pressing against each other, watching people mill about.
Lai Jin cleared his throat. “Haiyan…” Ayaana turned to him. “Your friend on the ship, Delaksha…”
Ayaana smiled. “Yes?”
The rush of the approaching train interrupted his next words. “What time is it?” he shouted as if shocked. A scramble. He carefully placed Ayaana’s rucksack over her shoulders as she watched the train stretch out its halt. Lai Jin’s arms on her shoulder, he spoke into her ear, said, “I will mail the repairs.”
Ayaana stared fixedly at the milling passengers. Lai Jin then took her face to make her look at him. She squeezed her eyes shut. Ignoring the watchers, he locked his arms around her. “Look,” he said, “there. Autumn’s sparrows.” She opened her eyes. A swift pressing of lips that left the impression of everything and nothing.
They waited for more passengers to board the train. Some announcements. Ayaana kissed the burned side of his face, the fingers of her right hand stroking it. She turned abruptly to board her train, stumbling a little on the bottom step that led into her carriage.
* * *
—
Lai Jin saw Ayaana disappear into the train. He heard the train’s baleful honk. His shoulders slumped. After half a minute, he straightened his back. He inhaled the night: its scent of salt and sea and, today, a hint of wild rose. With slow steps, he started the long journey back to his shelter.
* * *
He did not know when she had done it, but the next day, as he stripped off his clothes to sleep, he found the Basmallah she had sketched for him, black ink on white paper; crafted as a sparrow in flight.
[ 87 ]
Insomnia. The gold-tinged hours before dawn, and it was almost quiet in the city. Ayaana was watching the sky as she swirled in a force of life currents that had converged within her: absence, desire, choice, certainty. An hour later, she was scrabbling in the suitcase where she had concealed nostalgia’s trinkets: Muhidin’s now silent watch, the yellowing map she had taken from Muhidin’s chest, her mother’s essences, which suffused the room with their life, and Lai Jin’s Zao Wou-Ki print. She sat down with her knees drawn up and stared at these artifacts as if they might reveal a way.
* * *
—
Ayaana dressed up in a demure pink suit and open-toed shoes, and tied up her hair to look severe. Camouflage. She took herself to the university administrator’s office to wait. After an hour, a woman with viciously sheared black locks that made her look like an animated cartoon superheroine dealt with Ayaana, who was made to understand that her desperate excursion had displeased the authorities. The woman studied Ayaana surreptitiously as she indicated a seat. Ayaana sat in decorous silence, her head humbly lowered. It would be another two hours before the acting main supervisor called her in.
Ayaana entered the room, stooping. She embodied regret. She commenced her performance in as perfect a Mandari
n as she could muster. She had learned her lines. “I apologize for causing you such distress. I thought only of myself. But I could not contain my sorrow. I needed help to keep my head from exploding.” She hesitated. Was “exploding” too dramatic a word? “In pursuit of my father’s ghost, I have brought shame to you, who are my honorable hosts. I beg your forgiveness.” “Father’s ghost”? Perhaps she should have left that out; she did not want to invite a psychiatric evaluation. “I needed another sea.” This was true. Here her voice cracked. She stopped and kept her eyes low. Ayaana counted the faux-marble tiles of a sickly beige and white. In that posture, she listened to a detailed lecture on the values of protocol and procedure, of manners and good conduct, of the shame that a disordered person brings upon her country. Ayaana’s mind drifted, returning to the lighthouse, and to Lai Jin looking down at her from a high window.
* * *
—
The lecture eventually ended. The room was still. Ayaana said, “With your permission?” Her supervisor nodded. “I am dedicated to working three times harder. I will complete my studies within a year.”
Her acting supervisor was impassive. She started, “The Descendant…” Her voice faded. The whole “return of the Descendant” experiment was wearisome. The machinery that had brought Ayaana to China had moved on to other emblematic ways of excavating, proving, and entrenching Chinese rootedness in Africa—archaeological expeditions, cultural collaborations, infrastructure projects, mass migrations, and the seduction of credit. The woman sighed. “Pass your exams with success.” Ayaana nodded. She was very good at passing exams. “Xuexi jinbu,” the woman added—Study well. Ayaana nodded again. She walked to the door, then dashed away as it closed behind her.
* * *
As she rushed back to her room, her heart felt stuck. Later, huddled under blankets, her hands damp, her look stern, Ayaana phoned her mother.
“Daughter!” Munira exclaimed.
“Ma,” Ayaana replied. She paused, “Any news?”
“None.”
Ayaana said, “Ma?”
“Yes.”
“Who is my father? The one of my blood?”
All silences in that moment. Mother and daughter trembled. “I need to know,” Ayaana added. Her voice was frantic. Munira was quiet. Ayaana cried, “The question is like a hole inside me. I look at every man and wonder…”
Munira said, “I don’t know.”
Ayaana waited, her hands sweating, hearing resonances from her own “don’t know”s.
Munira then asked, “Wasn’t I father enough for you, Ayaana? What about Muhidin, whom you chose? Is he not ‘father’ enough?”
Munira heard Ayaana’s faintly whispered “No.” She was now on her knees in her house in Pemba. “Lulu, those questions are consuming ghouls.”
Ayaana cried, “I live with them. I live inside them.”
Silence. Munira, alarmed, asked, “What has happened to you?”
“Why?”
“Why now?”
“I have asked before.”
In Pemba, by the sea, Munira knelt. Somewhere in the house, a child started to cry. She lifted her head to listen. She paused. More than anything else, it was this, the crying child, that inspired her next words. “Zamani za kale”—Once upon a time—Munira’s voice sputtered. She started up again. “There was a creature. She thought that it was her right to be best loved by all. She knew herself as queen of history and could therefore write any dream for herself.” Munira began to cry.
“She imagined she would leave Pate and go to England, to Paraguay, to Italy, to Iran…anywhere her heart desired.”
Ayaana listened.
Munira continued tearfully. “She was the most beautiful of her generation on an island of the most beautiful women of the seas. She was desired. She was envied. In secret she imagined for herself an enchanted being as consort who would be worthy of her, to whom she would bestow the honor of leading her away from her small island.” A withering sound.
For a second, Ayaana heard again the rustle of the leaves on an island evening; the shadows that hovered, the rhymes of her seas. Soft-voiced, Munira continued. “One day, in Mombasa, where this girl was sent to study, she caught sight of a shining being adorned with gold. He glittered with promise. And when he spoke, men listened to him. She looked and loved him on sight.”
Ayaana made a sound. “My father,” she announced, as if meeting him for the first time.
“Yes,” Munira said.
“What does he look like?” Ayaana asked.
Munira wrestled with her heart, dug around to try to remember the face of that one she had imagined she adored more than life, more than death. Residue of feelings—that was all that remained. Her dart of triumph: one completed exorcism. She told Ayaana, “I can’t remember. I do not see his face. He was tall. Like you.” Uncertain.
Munira did not speak to Ayaana of abandonment, of existential terror, of the death of self. She offered the minimum: “We were not married. I believed in him more than I did God. Him I could touch. Do you understand?” Ayaana’s “Yes” was stagnant on her tongue. “When I conceived you, he left. I looked for him. I discovered that not even the name he had given me was real.”
Another sound from Ayaana, a splintering. Munira added, “I was alone with you when you were born. You were destined to live. I worked. I went back to Pate.” Quietness. Munira ended: “My family left when I returned.”
Each waited for the other to speak.
Ayaana finally asked, “Because of me?”
“No, me,” Munira countered. Breathing softly.
“Why didn’t you marry?”
“What I could salvage of life, mwanangu, belonged only to you.” Silence. Munira conceded, “I also needed to grow up.”
Ayaana rubbed her heart. Some absences, she was beginning to see, were part of existence: faceless and nameless forever. She wiped away her tears. She did have a father. Ayaana’s voice was strained. “Will our Muhidin return?” Munira choked. “Ma-e,” Ayaana suddenly said, “how I miss you.”
Munira paused before whispering, “And I you, my lulu.”
After that phone conversation, for almost two hours, Ayaana sat by her study desk, lost in silence.
[ 88 ]
Sitting outside, Ayaana shuddered as the waters changed color to look as disgruntled and wrinkled as an unwanted prophet. She was wrapped in a coat, eating a chicken spring roll on a bench close to a fountain in front of the lake, and feeding curious birds with pieces, her bicycle on the ground at her feet. She sensed Koray before she saw him. He sat down next to her, his hands leaning on his knees. “Tell me, Ayaana,” he said. She continued tossing pieces at the birds. “It is rumored you took yourself into some seaside shrine; was the expedition useful?”
She did not answer.
“Must have been. You are also likely to finish your course requirements ahead of the class? You did not care to let me know?”
“No,” Ayaana answered.
“Halwa?” he offered.
She said, “No, thank you.”
“Halwa?” Koray insisted, his voice soft. His hands were on her elbows. “My lover?”
Ayaana shivered. She feigned her indifference and chewed her food.
“Adultery and apostasy are offenses punishable by death,” Koray suggested. “For all sorts of verifiable reasons,” he chortled, “I have a right to exact retribution.” He smiled, and then drummed his hands against the back of the park bench.
Ayaana briefly contemplated the threat, and then resumed her chewing.
“What say you, sweetheart?”
“Go die, Koray.”
He leaned in to her ear to whisper, “Were you alone in your ‘temple’?”
A malicious impulse. “Of course not.”
“A man?” Koray asked.
“Oh
, look at those naughty green birds.” She indicated the water with her chin.
He insisted, “Did he touch you?”
Ayaana glowered. “How are your studies going, Koray?”
Koray was fencing her in with his body. A glint in his eyes. “Where did you sleep?”
“Did you destroy my vases?” she asked; she was scowling at him.
With his pupils dilating, Koray pressed his nose to her neck. She struggled to free herself. Now Koray applied pressure on the nerves of her arm and thigh, and when she tried to move, searing pain shot up her spine and caused her to crumple over. Koray was breathing against her face. “Who was he?”
Ayaana whimpered, “Ahhh!”
Koray pressed hard. Her eyes watered.
“Koray, stop it,” she cried.
He pulled her hair. “Who?”
She gritted her teeth. “Get off me.”
“Wrong answer, canim. I can do this”—his hand wrapped around her neck—“and this.” He squeezed. “In a public place, with a view of a lotus-filled lake…nobody knows you are dying except me…and you, naturally. That is power.”
Ayaana scratched at the air. Koray laughed. Ayaana shut her eyes. Her occasional asthma was something like this sensation. The darkness of underwater also had something of this. There was always a point when the human urge to breathe ceased. She relaxed, waiting for it. Time receded. Voices dissolved into Koray’s whispers into her ear—vile words to describe her, her race, her nation, her island, her body, and what he would do to her. “Fight me!” he demanded.
Never!
It was the last thing she thought.
This was power—her detachment.
* * *
The Dragonfly Sea Page 42
