The Newlyweds

by Nell Freudenberger

  If it was a punishment, it was meant for her. How careless she had been! She’d betrayed George with Nasir and then betrayed Nasir’s trust as well. Worst of all was what she’d done to her parents. She’d felt invincible, going blithely on her invented errands, as if her passport were a shell protecting her from harm. Her father, of course, hadn’t felt the same way. Perhaps he’d even guessed that something like this might happen, that as they got closer to their departure, Salim would have gotten bolder and more reckless. Salim’s more clever elder brothers—Bhulu and Laltu—might have instructed him not to risk harming Amina, the one with the American bank account, and so he had attacked her father in a last, desperate attempt at extortion or revenge.

  And yet her father had taken a needless risk—for what? For a gift he imagined presenting to his American son-in-law: a piece of silk George would look at once, pretend to admire, and then put away on the top shelf of a closet, along with the stained trousers he could no longer wear to work. When she thought of their conversation about Long Nose, she was nauseated to think of how she’d made her father feel. Abba often joked about his own failures, his gift for making the wrong decision again and again. Had they ever corrected him? Had he taken this chance because he valued his own life so cheaply, or was it because he thought they did, too?

  Her mother had finished her prayer, and Omar stepped into the hall because he wasn’t getting reception.

  “I’m sorry, Amma.” She pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder. “It’s my fault.”

  But her mother didn’t touch her, or move to accommodate the embrace, and so Amina lifted her face. Her mother gave her a strange, distant look.

  “It’s God’s will,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Let me go ask again,” she begged. Her mother shrugged, but Omar stopped her at the threshold.

  “That boy will inform us,” he said. “Better to wait here.” She could remember joking with her parents in the past about her uncle’s worldliness. Her aunt would ostentatiously complain that she couldn’t even send him to the market anymore, because his size and fine clothes led people to assume he was a bideshi and give him the foreigner’s price. Now it was a shock to see how much more of an insider Omar was than she herself. The way he failed to make eye contact frightened her, as if he knew something about her father’s condition she didn’t. The pictures she had seen in newspapers and on TV over the years came back to her: faces misshapen and caved in on themselves; a child’s mouth shrunken down to a tiny O; a woman with one eye missing, simply swallowed up by flat, white skin. And those were the ones who survived. She tried to picture her father’s face as it had been this morning, when he’d put her into the rickshaw, but what came to her was a much older memory—of a childhood visit to her dadu’s village. She was living with her parents in Dhaka then, so she must have been seven or eight. They’d gone down for one of their rare visits to Kajalnagar. Amina had wanted a coconut—the young, green variety that grew in clusters from the skinniest palms—and her father had said he would show her how to climb it. She’d never seen him do that, and she’d watched in amazement as he rolled up the legs of his city trousers, put his glasses on the ground at the base of the tree, and began to climb, hand over hand, closing his feet adeptly around the trunk. When he was almost at the top, he grinned down at her and, without grabbing the nut, started his half-scrambling, half-sliding descent.

  “But you didn’t get it,” she’d said, disappointed, and her father had said:

  “Now you try.” He’d given her a boost, holding on to her feet while she tried to pull with her hands. She had been frightened but excited, and eager for the prize at the top. She thought now that there was no way she could have made it that high, but her father didn’t stop her; it was her mother who came out of the house, her orna pulled over her head as it almost always was in her husband’s village, yelling at her father and demanding to know if he was crazy.

  “She’s a little girl,” Amina remembered her scolding him: “What will people say? You want her to grow up to be a coconut seller?” She also remembered the way the smooth-looking bark had made long, thin scratches in the soles of her feet, and how her father had bent down to whisper, as they followed her mother back to the house:

  “You were almost there—next time.”

  Her mother knew how to plan for every contingency, and Amina had always been able to execute those plans. But her father was the one who’d had the inspiration for their boldest ventures—the only one of the three of them who knew instinctively how to hope. If she’d accomplished anything, she saw now, it was because her father had made her believe that she could.

  It was another forty-five minutes before the orderly returned to say that her father was being brought out of surgery. They left the airless little room, and Omar took out his wallet again: there were no beds in the ward, but Omar spoke to the orderly in private, and when they returned, it turned out that one would become available as of that evening.

  When the trolley boy wheeled him toward them in the corridor, her mother finally started to cry. Amina was crying, too, and it was a relief to see that he was sleeping. Her father’s neck, shoulders, and chest were bandaged, as well as the upper portion of his arms, giving the forearms an exaggeratedly sticklike appearance. They’d covered his legs with a blue blanket in spite of the heat, and his chest was rising and falling under the bandages.

  “This can’t just be allowed to happen,” Amina said. “We have to report it!” Her mother and her uncle exchanged glances, and her mother patted the air, motioning for her to lower her voice. It wasn’t only that her father was sleeping, but that there was, of course, no privacy in the corridor.

  “Salim knows how to disappear,” her uncle said. “We could press charges—but it would take years to come to court, you understand. And by then, hopefully you’ll all be settled in America.”

  She saw the logic of what her uncle was saying, but it was impossible to let it go. “But what about the man who sold it? Isn’t he responsible as well?”

  “Of course,” her uncle said patiently. “They’re supposed to have permits. But who would go to the trouble of getting one if the police never bother to check? Even if they did check, the price of the permit would buy them off.”

  Her father’s surgeon came soon after the orderly left and said that her father had been fortunate compared with many survivors of acid attacks. He guessed that the attacker had used a small jar, perhaps in order to conceal it more easily, and his aim had been less than perfect. (Later her grandmother would say that the attack had been carried out with the ineptitude characteristic of her father’s family.) The doctor noted that the worst wounds were to his father’s chest, but the skin graft had been successful. The men who’d rescued and brought him to the hospital had known enough to flush his wounds with water; the doctor explained how the acid could burn through tissue in minutes and, in cases when it wasn’t neutralized immediately, even melt human bones. Her mother had been standing behind Amina, mesmerized by the doctor, but now she gasped audibly. The doctor didn’t look up from her father’s chart, but remarked that they were lucky the acid hadn’t hit his eyes.

  “Or his hands,” Omar said.

  Amina looked at him.

  “They’ve already taken his fingerprints,” her uncle said matter-of-factly. Then he turned to the doctor. “My brother-in-law is in the process of emigrating. Once his visa arrives, when will it be possible to travel?”

  “That depends on his progress. The nurses will show them how to change the bandages.” He glanced at Amina and her mother, then turned back to Omar. “And then he’ll come back for my assessment.” The doctor suggested that if her father recovered as expected, he might be moved as soon as Friday. There was no hope, she realized suddenly, that they would leave for America this weekend.

  The doctor left, followed by Omar, who promised that Fariq would drop off a package of supplies in a few hours. Her mother whispered her
gratitude, but her uncle shrugged off the familiar thanks: this was what family members did for one another. As soon as Omar was gone, a young nurse appeared to show them how to change the bandages. Amina had to force herself to look. The skin was gone, and the human meat underneath was sizzled and charred, dark blisters swollen with blood and areas of fluid, yellow pus. She tried to concentrate on her father’s sleeping face, which was paler and older than usual, but otherwise the same as the one she remembered from those mornings of her childhood, when she’d woken up first and watched her parents sleeping. Especially just after she’d been reunited with them in Dhaka, she had liked to examine their faces, compare them with the ones she’d held in her memory during the time they’d been apart. Was there something she’d forgotten—an unfamiliar mole or crease? Her mother always leaped out of bed the moment she awoke, to begin the morning’s tasks, but when Amina was still small enough, her father would put his feet together in the air, hold her hands, and lift her up so that she could pretend to fly.

  “She won’t do it again,” her mother said, once the nurse had gone.

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t like dirty work,” her mother said. “And they hate everyone to see them treating men. We’ll have to do it ourselves.”

  Two women in the next bed who had been staring at her father started talking audibly, shaking their heads at the novelty of a man suffering a fate usually reserved for young women. Amina wanted to tell them to shut up, a laughable notion amid the babble of voices in the corridor: wailing, haranguing, coughing, arguing, laughing. She had remembered to secure her engagement ring in a zippered compartment of her purse, but she was aware that her clothes—the dressy shalwar kameez she was still wearing from her visit to Mrs. Rahman—made her look both more and less prosperous than she was. Instead of her parents’ daughter, newly returned from America, she looked like something much more recognizably enviable: a woman like her cousin Ghaniyah, expensively dressed and educated, married but not yet burdened with children. She felt apart from the hospital’s commotion and fraudulent at the same time.

  As the evening came, her father slipped in and out of consciousness, once opening his eyes completely and attempting to speak before going back to sleep. There was a sense of anticipation in the hallway as new relatives arrived with tiffin carriers full of food, and the smells became even more intense. The upper half of the walls was peeling, and the green paint on the lower portion didn’t obscure the brownish-red stains where people had spit paan. Amina felt as if she might vomit, especially after she used the hospital toilet, pulling her trousers up above her knees before she squatted over the rank hole. Her father had a bedpan, which her mother emptied matter-of-factly, hurrying back afterward to his bed. There was a large crack along the bottom of the wall, in which you could see ants and brown cockroaches scavenging for the bits of food that dropped from the improvised picnic dinners on each of the patients’ beds.

  Her father woke up at seven thirty and asked for water. They propped the pillow under his back and got him into a half-sitting position; her mother tipped the bottle gently, so that the water trickled into his mouth. Amina went downstairs to the nurses’ station to ask what her father could safely eat; her aunt had provided a mild and nourishing yellow dal, but she had to stand there for fifteen minutes before one of them acknowledged her. (She had noticed that the nurses sat and chatted until someone approached; then they were suddenly busy with the stacks of blue clipboards.) When they finally approved the dal, she went down and found her father refusing her mother’s attempts to feed it to him.

  “What can I do, Abba?” she asked, but her father shook his head and then winced suddenly.

  “Don’t smile,” her mother scolded. “See how that pains your neck.” She fed him three spoonfuls of the dal before he regurgitated it onto the bandages.

  “I can change it,” her mother said. “I watched them carefully. Then I’ll help him with the bedpan. You go for fresh air.” Amina started to argue and then saw her father’s expression: it was bad enough to have to suffer all of this in the hallway, without having his daughter watch as well.

  She went to stand at the window in the stairwell. Outside, the hospital’s grounds were still muddy from all the rain. The sky was pink above the coconut palms, but the street outside the gate was artificially dark beneath the heavy acacias. A pair of young men passed, arms interlinked, their heads bent together in secret confidence. Crows wheeled above them, crying, and landed in the rinsed black leaves. She watched until she was overcome by a sense of her own uselessness, and then she went to find the doctor.

  She had planned to rail at him in the officious style of her Devil Aunt, until he acquiesced and moved her father. She finally found him examining a boy on a bed in the second-floor hallway, the agitated relatives hardly giving him room to move. The family didn’t look like they could’ve paid anything in bribes, but the doctor was kneeling on the floor by the boy, taking his pulse. Amina noticed the dark stains on the front of the doctor’s shirt—the hallway felt airless, even with all the windows open—and she simply stood there watching him.

  It was after eleven when they finally moved her father to the ward, which was cleaner but as crowded as the hallway, with tiled walls and a scrubbed concrete floor. The ward boy who appeared told them matter-of-factly that the saline drip the doctor had recommended would cost seven hundred fifty taka; Amina paid without protesting, although the machine looked decrepit, and she was surprised by the speed at which it whirred to life. In addition to the food, her aunt had sent Fariq with a package of extra bedding and two mosquito nets. Her mother set up a pallet on the floor next to the bed and invited Amina to lie down, but she’d been waiting until it was late enough to call George. She left the ward and went into the stairwell, where she stood on the landing between two floors. A window was open to the humming night, and she took her phone out of her purse; the reception was good, but there were no messages. When they hadn’t shown up tonight, Nasir would have called—but she was still using the phone Omar had lent her, and she didn’t know if he had the number. He would call her father’s phone, but of course that was turned off. For a moment she considered calling him herself, and then dialed Rochester instead.

  It was the morning of his interview, and George had just gotten out of the shower.

  “My father’s been attacked with acid,” she said, and again she began to cry. Her voice was so garbled that she thought George wouldn’t be able to make it out. “He’s had surgery already.”

  “Acid? Sweetheart—what?” The sound of his voice was an enormous relief, as if it somehow carried America inside it.

  “Amina?”

  She got herself under control. “He’s all bandaged—his arms and his chest. He’s barely awake, but they say the operation went well.”

  “But the acid,” George said. “I mean, who—?”

  Amina hesitated for only a moment. “A stranger,” she said. “Some crazy person. It missed his face, thank God.”

  “Was it hydrochloric acid?”

  “It’s usually sulfuric—when you read about it in the newspaper. But I didn’t ask the doctor.”

  “Christ, Amina—is he all right? What does it look like?”

  “It looks like a picture in the newspaper.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “Is the hospital okay? Are the doctors—”

  “It’s crowded and dirty.”

  “Are you okay—Amina, tell me, do you need me to come?” He stumbled over the words, and for a moment she considered what he was offering. She imagined him bringing not only the strength and size of his physical person, but that whole antiseptic newness along with him: she pictured her father in the kind of recovery room she and George had seen a hundred times on ER, in his own curtained enclave, with a pristine plate of unappetizing foods, separated and sealed with plastic. She and her mother would use a toilet in a clean, white bathroom, with a sign above the sink r
eminding them to wash their hands; they would take turns sleeping on chairs that reclined to become beds and complain about discomfort in the morning. Doctors would come in and out in white coats, their reassuringly unfamiliar names stitched onto their pockets—she longed suddenly for Jessica’s awful husband, Harold—making jokes while they checked an array of sophisticated machines.

  But George couldn’t bring America with him. He would be appalled by the conditions at the hospital and unequipped to help them with even the simplest errand outside. He would have to be checked into a hotel, where he would be able to do nothing but wait.

  “No—” she said. “No, but thank you. It’s not great, but basically … basically, we’re fine. We’ve bribed the staff for better treatment.”

  “Jesus,” George said. It struck her that this was the thing that seemed most to shock him—although that was probably unfair; there was so little of this that he could actually imagine.

  “We’ll shift to Moni and Omar’s now—as soon as my father is discharged. It could be as soon as Thursday.”

  “Where were you before?”

  “At Nasir’s. He’s my father’s—” She beat back a crazy urge to confess everything, to beg for his forgiveness.

  “Relative,” George supplied. “You told me. So this is still the best number to call? If you’re okay, I have to go to this interview now—but can I call you afterward?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “But will you call me if anything changes? I mean—you can call anytime, you know that, right? I won’t turn the phone off.”

  She didn’t want to hang up, as if there might be a risk of permanently severing the connection. If she could just get her parents away from here, everything would be all right. Once they had their Social Security numbers, her parents would be eligible for Medicaid; if her father needed care outside of what those benefits provided, they would find a way to pay for it. The care would be better in America, and so of course that was where they had to go. There was a kind of relief in realizing her choices had become so simple.