by Ami Rao
He walks ten steps behind her for the rest of the way, both out of respect and because he physically cannot keep up with her with the weight in his arms, although he realises with a tinge of admiration that she seemed to have managed all that way with no problem at all.
Walking like that, with her leading the way, never looking over her shoulder once, they enter the peaceful haven of Neve Tzedek and approach an apartment block with a handsome white façade, in front of which she stops, then finally turns around and invites him up for a glass of pomegranate juice in exchange for his load.
He accepts gratefully.
The following week, she travels with him to Jerusalem.
They travel like that, for ten days, like pilgrims, although she has lived in Israel her whole life.
Her family was killed, she tells him, eight years ago by a stray bomb that blew up the car they were sitting in, ready to attend a wedding. They had been waiting for her, she explains, in the car, her parents and her younger twin brothers, she was still in the house because she couldn’t find the shoes she was meant to wear with her dress, and by the time she found the shoes and came out, the car was no longer a car and the people in it were no longer people.
‘Saved by fashion,’ she quips, and she speaks dispassionately as if she feels nothing, no sorrow, no pain.
‘Do you hate them?’ he asks, horrified.
‘No,’ she says after a while. ‘Because I don’t know who “them” is. Anyway, if I hate them, it means they still control me. I don’t want them to control me.’ She looks at him, her face changes. ‘This is a different war, Chamor. In this war, there is no good and no bad, there is only perspective.’
She calls him Chamor, the Hebrew word for donkey. ‘My name is Abraham,’ he protests, but she will not stop. He calls her Yaffa, the word for beautiful. He doesn’t know her real name, she won’t tell him.
‘According to Kabbalah,’ she tells him one night, after he has been inside her, ‘within the soul of every individual is a hidden part of God that is waiting to be revealed, and the whole revelation of light or fulfilment, happiness, joy, peace... is of our doing. Our actions can reveal or conceal that light. That light sits in our potential.’
He kisses her face then, and her neck, and he feels her body rise. He shudders.
He has fallen for her.
Walking back from the Western Wall one morning, he feels a great sense of unease caused by their momentary gender-based separation.
That evening, they light candles and drink wine and he tells her what he’s told no one before her. He tells her about the streets. The streets of Sydney and the streets of Bangkok and the streets of Mumbai, these streets that come to life when darkness falls.
He shows her the knife wound, soft and rubbery, raised slightly over the muscles of his hard, flat stomach. Curved like a sceptre. She feels it, first with her fingers, then with her tongue.
‘I lost control,’ he says. ‘After my mother died, I lost control of my life.’
‘Then claim it back,’ she replies.
He laughs. ‘It’s not so easy. Everything is not so easy as you make it out to be.’
‘Yes,’ she says simply, ‘it is.’
He cups her small face in his large hands, holds it like that for a long time.
‘What’s your name?’ he begs. ‘Please tell me.’
‘Sarai,’ she says. Wife of Abraham.
Two hours after Kareem falls asleep in his bed in Manchester, having disposed of the last remaining vestige of his conscience, Abe wakes up in the bedroom in Israel next to this reminder of his own.
He looks at the sleeping girl next to him, her long, lush hair splayed across the pillow, jet black and glossy, the scattered plumage of a raven. Her face, her distinct cheekbones, the small barely discernible hump at the bridge of her nose that she’s ruefully told him she hates, her pink lips. Her skin, young and taut and olive-coloured. The umber, oval mole that sits on the soft ripe swell of her left breast, that rises and falls every time she breathes as if it has a life of its own, as if it too is breathing.
He looks at her a long time. Then he kisses her mouth gently, only a caress, and she stirs.
Outside, the sky is cloudless and very blue. The sun has risen already and makes shadows of dark orange on the tiles. Sometimes they go out onto the terrace, the girl and him, as soon as they wake, and the tiles feel deliriously warm under their bare feet.
The definition of a false life, she once told him, is when your source of happiness is external. The day will come, Chamor, when you will find that the source of real fulfilment and happiness is internal.
When she opens her eyes, he says, ‘I’m sorry. But I know you will understand.’
He has been thinking of these words all night, the right words, the right way to say them, but despite the preparation, he hadn’t counted on how difficult the real thing would be and his voice is heavy with sadness.
She shakes her head. She doesn’t know what he means. He can see it, the confusion in her dark eyes, and for a moment, it is only a moment, he wavers.
But then he says, ‘I’ve got to go.’
And she knows then from his face that he means forever.
Still she asks, ‘Go where?’
‘Someone is waiting for me,’ he says.
And she feels her head spin, like she is dizzy, like the air supply to her brain has been cut off.
‘Who is waiting for you?’ she asks.
‘There’s a little boy,’ he tells her, ‘in a little town by the sea.’
3.34
In New York, it has just gone midnight.
David and Ameena are home, sitting on the loveseat by the window. She sits leaning into him, in the way they like to sit together on that loveseat, her head on his chest, her legs stretched out, sandwiched between his. Billie Holiday croons on the radio. Delicate, soulful. Timeless. Outside, the Hudson shimmies in disco lights. A lone boat cruises by, casting a trail of golden light in its wake.
‘I’ll be seeing you. . .’
‘David,’ she says suddenly, tilting her face up towards him, ‘your jumper has a snag.’
He is wearing a thin wool sweater that she had bought for him, a rich, beautiful royal blue; they had shopped for it together, he had tried it on and she’d insisted on buying it for him – I want to, she’d said, the colour suits you so much.
It seems such a long time ago.
David looks down and sure enough there is the offending rip, he can see it, just below where it sits on his chest, front and centre, not somewhere discreet like the edge of a sleeve, and yet it had slipped by unnoticed until she pointed it out.
Ameena stares at it, at the spot where his body must have brushed against something and the jumper must have pulled, breaking the delicate fibres holding it together, causing the knit to come undone. It is only little right now, barely noticeable unless you know it is there. But she knows it is there, that is the problem, and now he does too, and it seems to stare back at her defiantly, the snag, those tiny stray strands of wool hanging limp and loose in a small, unnatural loop. Like a noose, she thinks. A miniature noose splayed and splintered and frayed along the edges, the fibres dangling like so many unresolved stories.
Stories of people and nations and lovers and land. Of Zoya. Of Yusuf. Of Ben and Ruth. Of Kareem. Of Abe. Of Sarai. Of Abby. Of Hershel. Of Peggy and Whitney and Denise Richards. Of Israel and Palestine. Of Jew. Of Muslim. Of David and Ameena.
Still, it is harmless, for the moment. Not nearly big enough for a human head. Nor a human finger, for that matter. But in time, she knows, it would become obvious, catching the eye of strangers on the street. The loop would pull further, grow bigger. More threads would come undone, get entangled, things would start to unravel, a hole would form.
And Ameena, realising this, feels what? What does she feel? Guilt? But
you don’t feel guilt over a snag in a jumper that you didn’t cause. She wants to say something then, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t tell him – cannot tell him – that the dancer had called some time ago, that she had taken his call, that she had seen him in his hotel room the night she was meant to be at the gallery, that she had done that out of loneliness or despair or spite or else out of something entirely different, she doesn’t really know herself.
And he cannot tell her, not about Narragansett, not about that afternoon in the little white cottage by the bay, not about Abigail Williams, not about how he had touched her, how gently, how carefully, because he didn’t dare be the one who finally broke her, no, the responsibility would be too much, not about how he had loved her that afternoon in her tiny bedroom, with the windows flung open and the wind off the bay and the taste of the sea on her skin and the sounds of the piano from the other side of the thin wall played with a terrific frenzy by an autistic child.
‘I didn’t even notice it,’ he says.
‘Shall I fix it?’ she asks.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to…
My family-my loves, for reminding me what’s important in life.
The incredible team at Fairlight for putting their faith into my writing, especially to Urška Vidoni for crafting this into an infinitely better book.
My first readers, Elizabeth Dawson and Scott Livingstone, for making me feel that I wrote this thing for you. Geoffrey Horton for being my Nabokovian re-reader. Anyone who is familiar with Nabokov’s practice will understand the extent of my gratitude.My friends, for imparting the kind of cultural wisdom that is not available in a classroom: Sadia Hamid. Sabahat Gurdezi. Sadaf Khan. Brett and Yael Rhode. Ruth Arron.
Jim Lawless for your loyalty, your friendship and your Beethoven (but Bach is still the greatest!).
John Thangaraj for everything advertising. Holly Drewett and Megan O’Rourke for so much of the art. My son’s music teacher, Rob Parton, for all the unofficial lessons in music theory.
Special thanks to David Bolchover, whose profound understanding of Jewishness is truly astounding and for your capacity to share a small slice of that with me.
Jazz pianist extraordinaire, Aaron Goldberg, for your deep passion for and knowledge of your art and for so generously indulging my curiosity of it. But most of all for your musicianship which is sensational and pushed me over the edge.
Buried somewhere in this novel are a string of words that go like this: ‘…if her face is the moon, then his is the sun, whose light, lights hers…’ My dearest Sid, thank you for everything, for without you, there’d be no light.
About the Author
Ami is a British-American writer who was born in Calcutta, India and has lived and worked in New York City, London, Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ami has a BA in English Literature and Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. When she is not reading, writing, cooking, eating, sailing or dancing she can be found listening to jazz, her ‘one great unrequited love’.
Ami has mentored girls of colour for the past twelve years, especially those from problematic family backgrounds. Her mentoring efforts include a keen emphasis on the merits of reading and education.
Ami co-wrote a memoir, Centaur, which was published in 2017. The book won the General Outstanding Sports Book of the Year Award 2018 and it was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2017.
FAIRLIGHT BOOKS
Jac shreeves-lee
Broadwater
This farm, these people, these blocks, these roads are my home.
Welcome to Broadwater Farm, one of the most well-known housing estates in Britain. A place where post-war dreams of concrete utopia ended in riots, violence and sub-standard housing.
In this collection, Tottenham-born Jac Shreeves-Lee gives voice to the people of Broadwater Farm. With evocative language and raw storytelling, she compassionately portrays their shared sense of community. A community with a rich cultural heritage, comprising over forty nationalities, generations old.
‘This new collection of site-specific stories by Jac Shreeves-Lee redresses the balance by virtue of the warmth of her narrative voice and the spirit, pluck and humanity of her characters.’
—Onjali Q. Raúf, activist and author of The Boy at the Back of the Class
Helen Stancey
Relative Secrets
Mary has a secret that she mustn’t tell. But in a care home, with her mind wandering, she’s starting to slip up. Clearing out her grandmother’s old room, Lucy finds something hidden that wasn’t supposed to be found – a locket sheltering a shameful family secret.
She can’t tell her mother. Not with their father gone, one brother absent and another acting up. Her mother was struggling with her mental health just a few years ago. Lucy will have to make sense of it all herself.
In a beautifully told drama of family secrets, Helen Stancey once again picks through the everyday of life to uncover poetry, pain and ultimately love.
Praise for Helen Stancey’s writing:
‘In the poised assurance of its writing…one has a sense of a writer gifted with an instinctive sense of how to tell a story.’
—The Spectator
‘Writing so accomplished…’
—The Tablet
