by Judy Croome
Chapter 23
Jamila
“How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?”
‘Lulu said she didn’t want to come to my wedding,’ Jamila says to Chuki Samanya as they sit on the white expanse of the bed Chuki shares with her husband. ‘But she’s not spoken to me for days.’
‘Why care about her?’ Chuki says. The sharp clink of her wine glass on the bedside table startles Jamila. ‘Stop worrying. You were kind to her—you did it for her own good!’
Ignoring a quiet, inner warning—and a memory of a naive young girl staring at a dew-dropped nova—Jamila agrees. ‘In a way, I was being kind to her, wasn’t I?’ She curls her bare feet underneath her, the white leather headboard cool against her bare shoulders, so at ease in this room it’s hard to remember she was once afraid of it. In the weeks since Dawud has been at war, she has visited so often that she has learnt to relax in the Samanya house.
• • •
Chuki takes her into the bedroom after dinner and slides open a cupboard door, revealing an enormous plasma television screen. It looks out of place to Jamila, with its black, blank face reflecting the colour and contours of the all-white bedroom.
‘Let’s watch a movie,’ Chuki says.
Jamila enjoys having a friend like Chuki. Blossoming under Chuki’s attention, her confidence has grown. She’s so different Dawud won’t recognise her when he returns from The War.
When Chuki opens a bottle of wine, she refuses.
‘One glass won’t hurt you,’ Chuki says, her eyes black in the subdued glow of the lamps.
Jamila remembers the taste of the wine on the night she first kissed her ezomo. Her heart skips an anxious beat and she slides back into a moonlit night, right into eyes that belong to another Samanya.
‘There’s no one else here,’ Chuki reminds her. ‘Relax and enjoy yourself.’
Jamila, mortified by the hint of mocking laughter, says, ‘It’ll be good to relax,’ and takes the glass. She wants to dive deep into the ocean of experience, without worrying about drowning, so she finishes the wine with slow sips. When it’s empty, Chuki refills it. Later, Jamila falls asleep and wakes up entwined with Chuki, who laughs at her awkward stiffening.
‘You’re so shy, Jamila,’ she says, ‘and sweet. Don’t be embarrassed; it’s girls only. Think of it as a grown-up pyjama party.’
In the face of her amusement, Jamila shrugs off the unfamiliarity of waking up to someone who wasn’t Dawud. Sleeping overnight in the Samanya’s marriage bed, while her ezomo is away from home, becomes a regular routine.
• • •
Tonight they start with a casual supper. They sit cross-legged on the wide bed watching the classic “Twelve Angry Men.” As she reaches for her customary glass of wine, Jamila leans back into the padded luxury of the bed’s headboard.
‘Where does Daren go when we’re here?’ she asks.
‘Oh, he keeps himself busy,’ Chuki says enigmatically. ‘He says we’ll enjoy ourselves more without him.’
‘I do enjoy these times,’ Jamila replies. ‘When we’re on our own.’
Jamila means what she says. But, to her surprise, she finds that she misses the time she used to spend with Lulu. Not that they had a regular arrangement, but Lulu was always there when she needed to talk about things she can’t talk about to Chuki. Now that is gone.
Since Chuki told Jamila not to invite Lulu to the wedding, she asks herself whether she’d acted in the way of the Spirit King. She rubs her gold chains repeatedly and wonders what the Spirit King would have done. Would he have insisted that someone like Lulu be part of what she can never have? Lulu said politeness had driven her acceptance, and yet…the Pale One has withdrawn into a place where Jamila is unable to follow.
She has Chuki’s friendship, but how can she tell Chuki—who has no interest in forming an allegiance with the Spirit King—she’s certain she’s about to touch Granny Zahra’s essence? The old woman has begun to ask questions about what’s happening at St Jerome’s and Jamila hopes they’ll soon attend services together. Lulu would’ve shared her excitement had they been talking to each other. She sighs, and sips from her wine glass.
‘Are you thinking of that freaky Pale One?’
She grimaces and Chuki slips a comforting arm around her shoulder. ‘You’re too tender-hearted for your own good,’ she says. ‘You did what’s best for that creature. She should appreciate your concern.’
‘I did it for her own good,’ Jamila agrees and smiles gratefully. ‘You understand me. Not even Dawud understands me so well.’
‘You’re easy to understand,’ Chuki says. She lies back, close to Jamila even though the bed is big. A quiet chuckle huffs from deep in her chest as she adds, ‘Very easy to understand,’ and strokes her hand up and down, up and down, Jamila’s arm.
The rhythm and the wine soon soothe Jamila and she relaxes. She’s become comfortable with the fact that her friend is a “toucher.” Almost every sentence, every action the other woman makes involves a stroke, a brush, or a kiss and a hug.
‘People like us do it all the time,’ Chuki had said when Jamila, embarrassed at her gaucherie, flinched. ‘When you’re one of us, you’ll do it too.’
As her head droops onto Chuki’s shoulder, she doesn’t resist and slips an arm around her friend to make herself more comfortable. It brings back an almost forgotten memory.
Sharing a mattress with her younger brothers on the floor of their small tin shack, a heavy thunderstorm overhead, hailstones the size of golf balls hammering at the roof. But, while Papa spoke to the boys, Mama was there, holding her, stroking a hand up and down, up and down, Jamila’s arm, telling her she’s special, she’s somebody, she’s Jamila Johnson and she will be safe.
She hears them. Papa’s deep, Mama’s lighter, tones, but this time there is no anxiety. There’s a note of raw desire, and she half pushes herself upright but Mama—no, Chuki—says, ‘Hush. Go back to sleep.’ A pillow slides beneath her head as she’s lowered back onto the mattress.
‘Mama,’ she murmurs, restless, for the memories make her anxious.
‘Don’t be afraid. You don’t have to be afraid.’
But she is afraid. In the depths of her dream, she remembers the fear that they will wash away, like the little boy one summer. Wrapped in his rough grey blanket, the flood of storm waters sucked him in and, like the sinners who drowned in the Age of the Great Flood, their hands clawing out of the tumultuous waves that showed no mercy, he was dragged down and down until there was no chance of ever being saved.
She struggles a bit, as the hands feather over her body. The cool night air brushes her skin with a tender touch and she’s not scared any more. The duet soothes; it murmurs; it calms; even as the hands, more than one, more than two, knead her fear into a warmer, more dangerous seduction.
She twists her way through the layers of uncertain sleep. She wants to find Mama and Papa, but the closer she is to them, the more they separate into different words and a different place.
‘She’s awake,’ Chuki says.
Jamila opens her eyes to stare into Chuki’s face. Not the face of her friend Chuki. The eyes have changed: there’s a hunger in them she can’t explain. She’s seen it in the mirror, sometimes, after Dawud has rolled off her, replete, but leaving her restless and yearning for the impossible.
Chuki smells different too. Like the acrid poison Enoch used to spray the court garden before he brought Chuki into the office. It trickles down Jamila’s nose, into the back of her throat. As she coughs and surfaces into full wakefulness, she realises this smell frightens her more than the vicious drumming of those hailstones on the flimsy tin roof of the shack Papa built.
She blinks, and drops her eyes from Chuki’s, then wishes she hadn’t. For Chuki is naked, as naked as she is, and that look, that hunger in Chuki’s eyes, keeps her frozen as Chuki lifts a hand and closes it on Jamila’s breast, her naked breast. As she captures Jamila’s gaze, she leans forward and places her
lips, open-mouthed and damp with relish, on the other breast and Jamila gasps a sob, even as she closes her eyes to the horror. The damp, delicious horror of what she wants and what she feels.
From somewhere above her, or behind her, there is another. She cannot tell, because the feeling, the licking, the loving are like a fire in her blood. They consume her, and she almost doesn’t hear Daren Samanya when he says, ‘It’s been a long time, Jamjar. Did you miss me?’
The shock of his proximity, the fulfilment of her quiescent dream, forces the heaviness from her eyelids. She snaps them open. She is two: her ezomo and her. Both naked. Stretched out behind her, he crams his heated length along her back. He kisses and strokes her, until she begins to sink beneath the turbulent waters that swallow her into the belly of the ocean monster that devoured the sinners as the ancient floodwaters rose and rose.
Languorous with the inevitability of it, she turns her head to peer over her shoulder. ‘Where’s Chuki?’ she asks.
‘She’ll be back,’ he says. ‘When you want her.’
‘Why did she do this?’ she moans, half in despair, half in pleasure, as he flips her over to face him and mounts her with a smooth, slick movement.
‘You did it to yourself, Jamila.’ He begins to move in an ancient rhythm and she moans and reaches for what she’s yearned for in all the long years she resisted him. ‘Because I’m what you’ve always wanted.’ He laughs and croons, ‘I’m your temptation.’
‘You’re my ezomo!’ she cries. She closes her eyes, shutting out his Levid’s face, and closes her conscience against the thought of Dawud. Her beloved, somewhere in a desert war fighting to free people too far away to care about, while she is here, beneath another man.
She has learnt that—no matter how many times she’s petitioned, no matter how many times she’s tried to cleanse herself from this error by invoking the Spirit King’s name—her own desires, her own choices, are what betray her.
There is no fight left in Jamila. Finally, fully, she capitulates.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she says, and opens her arms and her body to Daren’s invasion. She welcomes him and surrenders to that other part that lives on within her. She has discovered two Jamilas: one saint, who smells as sweet as a white rose in winter, and one sinner, sour and bitter with the smell of a triumphant evil.
• • •
A long time later, how long she can never remember, she lies there naked as the day they dragged her from her mother’s womb, but not as innocent. Never as innocent, for she was born into Papa’s Great Error: unable to resist her ezomo, she instead embraces it.
Next to her, Daren stirs. He pushes himself upright to stare at her. ‘Do you think this,’ his hand sweeps an arc over the rumpled sheets, her nakedness, ‘is a Great Error, Jamila?’
The sound of her name on his lips enthrals her. It sanctions what they’ve shared in this bed: he recognises her essence, as she recognises his. She shakes her head and puts out a hand to annex his chest, flesh of her flesh. For a moment, as her palm collides with the solidness of him, she is shaken. He is cold, colder than ice, and she has a strange thought: what if there is no fire in hell, only ice?
She skitters her gaze upwards and a long ago shame tries to break into her consciousness. But she’s not the naïve and idealistic believer she once was. She has learnt, ironically from this man’s wife, that by her resistance of him, she’s conquered her ezomo. She has learnt, too, that she is both saint and sinner, entwined in a single restless body made nascent one long ago moonlit night.
She watches her hand trace the whorls of dark hair covering Daren’s chest and tells herself that her ezomo has never hurt Dawud, for she has never told him the truth of that night Samanya loved her. She alone suffered for it. She alone was the one who wasted so many years on a painful futile unhappiness. There is no cruelty to Dawud in this loving, or in those yet to come, and no really Great Error, for she will never tell him. His ignorance of her ezomo will keep him safe from it.
So, when Daren asks again, she answers, with cautious logic. ‘It’s not a Great Error,’ she says, ‘if no one is hurt.’
Her reasoning calms her. She is strong, and her vice is no vice but rather her frail humanity, tempered with the grace of her diligent kindness. Her kindness, she tells herself, keeps Lulu away from the wedding so she’ll not be hurt. And her kindness will keep this secret from Dawud: although she loves him, she wants Samanya in a way she has never wanted him. ‘So don’t talk of this to anyone. Dawud mustn’t be hurt when he comes back from The War.’
‘I won’t,’ Daren Samanya says and laughs. ‘You surprise me.’
‘I do?’
‘There’s no moral outrage this time,’ he grins. ‘No rattling of novas to keep you safe from your ezomo?’
It makes her angry, that grin, with its foxy, feral jubilation. ‘I’m not hurting anyone by being here,’ she says, as quiet and dignified as her nudity allows. ‘What reason is there for outrage?’
‘What reason?’ he asks and howls with laughter. ‘What a convenient integrity you have,’ he says. ‘And you’re not alone,’ he adds. ‘Thank the Spirit King! Or I’d spend eternity a lonely man.’
Jamila, before she finds herself in his arms once more, almost panics. For, deep in his face, in the blue eyes that pierce her very essence, she sees what she would become were it not for her allegiance. But for the strength of her devotion to the Spirit King, she would succumb to the power of her ezomo and become the Levid’s legacy.
• • •
She leaves the Samanya mansion late the next day. She does not see Chuki and, as she drives home, a slow drive via the long route along the coastline, she tries to shake off her unease. Away from Samanya’s essence, it uncurls deep within her, a throbbing that takes on a life of its own. Jamila flicks the indicator on as she turns into the driveway of the Templeton mansion and wonders if her discomfort is more to do with doubt than devotion.
But what is there to doubt? After all the years she has waited, her wedding is a scant two weeks away; Dawud will be home before the weekend is over. He’ll be happy, as she is happy. A woman made whole by fealty and friendship, she’ll make Dawud a good wife. Better than before Daren, before Chuki. Because now the unquenchable hunger Dawud never satisfies has a name and a face, and she no longer has to resist it. As long as Dawud is not hurt, Jamila contents herself with the assurance that her affair with Daren Samanya is not a Great Error. Rather, it shows the power of her fidelity: her absolute submission to the Spirit King and the certainty that he will love her despite her errors.
She’s smiling as she draws the car to a halt at the bottom of the stairway that sweeps up to the main entrance hall. As she climbs out of the car, she glances back over the driveway, past the huge iron gates and over the sea. A few dark clouds hover on the horizon, and the ocean is dull and grey and choppy, the kind of colour that makes her want to weep.
She’s halfway up the stairs before she sees the three figures that wait. Prior Ajani, small and rotund, with a worried frown. His arm is around Granny Zahra, dressed as she always is, in a severe navy suit, unadorned by any jewellery. Behind them, holding himself tall and stern, is a man in military uniform, his face unclear as a small, insubstantial cloud moves swiftly to cover the sun.
‘Dawud!’ she cries. ‘Dawud, you’re home!’
As she runs up the stairs to welcome him, she wonders if he’ll smell Daren on her. Even though her affair is merely a sign of her restless humanity, guilt pricks her. But, as she calls his name, the wisp of cloud uncovers the sun and she can see clearly. The man’s hair is not blonde, but silver. He’s not Dawud, but a stranger in a harsh brown uniform, and he stares at her with an uncomfortable pity.
She realises the day has gone wrong. None of this should have happened. But it has. Her allegiance, Jamila realises, is a fragile fealty, too easily led astray. And, as Prior Ajani steps forward and says her name, she discovers how easy it is to deceive oneself into believing what one wants to be
lieve.
The last vestiges of her devotion crumble under the onslaught. Her heart’s voice cries out that her dream is over. Over, over, over. She has lost it all.
She flings her hands up to cover her ears, to block out the relentless cry, but it doesn’t stop the truth from ringing out: she is alone and she is lost.
Without faith; without hope; and without a beloved to keep her safe.
Chapter 24
Zahra
“Charity itself fulfils the law,
and who can sever love from charity?”
Jamila says she believes there is a Spirit King who answers the petitions of the living. I am at the mansion, ready to welcome Dawud home, when Prior Ajani arrives with another visitor. He is tall, as tall as Enoch was, and the blood in my veins thrums. But he is not the stranger I long for. Instead, a military officer, immaculate in his uniform and professionally sympathetic, tells me Dawud, my beloved grandson, has died a hero’s death.
‘He refused to leave the hospital, Ma’am,’ the officer says. ‘Even though his commander told him to leave the wounded behind because the insurgents were too close.’
‘Why did they fight?’
His lips thin with irritation. ‘We needed the place as a hospital, but the rebels wanted their holy ground back.’
I hear the faint echo of long ago hooves scrape along a dusty road. I remember the warmth of another stranger’s arms and the sweet smell of cedar wood. I lived through that war. Dawud did not live through this one. ‘Did they get what they wanted?’
‘We held them off, Ma’am,’ he says, proud of the victory. ‘But casualties were high. That’s why your grandson wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t leave while the wounded needed help. He died a hero.’
‘He died.’
That’s all I can say. Dawud was my last chance at love. He, too, is gone and I find a part of me, long dead, had clung to a hope now irrevocably extinguished.
