There were final, retreating sounds and voices of everyone going to bed in this house that was not large enough yet accommodated each in his and her place, home. Even a lean-to.
The wedding presents were on the bed and the floor, lying or propped anywhere.
They laughed to one another.
Looks like a pawn-shop, remember, near the Café.
It was a nice old Jew who kept it. One time I had to take my watch there, until the end of the week when the garage paid.
What on earth to do with this? —She lifted the lamp by its bright metal petals, exaggerating its weight in the effort.
Khadija. Give it to her. She is collecting things like that for the fine house she’s going to make my brother buy for her. But some we will take of course.
Of course; was he thinking of the Koran, beautiful edition, a kind of family bible; the one she had sent for, the translation she read, was humbly mass-produced. But not the brass trays. He could not get the brass trays into the canvas bag. And what place would there be for such things that belonged here.
In America.
The kind gift of these strong flower-perfumes; to permeate everything you take away. Her attention wandered to the suitcase; elegant suitcase Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Danielle had chosen: waiting there. Tiredness rose to her head, the lean-to held the heat of the day. She pushed the window wide as it would go and there (like the dog) was the splendid night, waiting. She gave way to an impulse to let him in, into something she had not before, the kind of impulse—indiscretion? but he is her lover, her discovery—she used to give way to after too many drinks or too many joints in her old life. Let’s walk a while in the desert, it’ll be cool. The stars fantastic.
The desert. —His answer was to begin undressing.
Only down the street. Not far to go. As if he doesn’t know, he was born here, this is his place, not mine.
Let’s sleep. It’s late, who wants to go out there. Anywhere. Let’s sleep.
He stood before her as he had done every night in the doll’s house shed of his grease-monkey overalls like a prince freed of the spell cast upon him.
Chapter 42
Whether she dreams or whether a streaming profusion of thought was what she decides she must have dreamt, does not much matter. On the eve of moving out of some tentative anchorage it is either way the natural return of comparison, attempting the matching, somehow fitting together images, years, days, moments. The relative duration of these may be reversed in their significance. The moment is longer than the year. Whether this is a raided store of the subconscious or a wakeful night—when so-called dreams are recounted to yourself in the morning, how much is being invented in the urge to find the coherence between the conscious and subconscious; that must exist; is unattainable? Must be found. And if it could be found—there would be certainty. Of what? What does that mean? Of why you live as you do. And how that ought to be. No rules, not those of The Suburbs or even (not any more!) those no-rules of The Table—the elusive coherence is what there would be to go by—something of what is known grandly as the truth. But avoid big words, for Chris’ sake, for the Prophet’s sake. Well, the individual truth. Nobody else’s.
The stream of vision, thoughts, re-creation has a kind of narrative of its own; the desert is a good place for it to relate itself. On the terrace in California (which, like the child’s ship, she had never seen except in prototype in the media) there are assembled the guests of Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ Sundays, Danielle and her mother; or Danielle-and-her-mother one and the same. Men beside a sauna (sauna! where does that detail come from!) are talking about winnings and losses at Black Jack and buying into the Future on the stock exchange. The latest husband introduces Ibrahim to the right people, there’s the international website man who emigrated to Australia and the black lawyer turned business entrepreneur. Her mother/Danielle introduces Ibrahim/Abdu to women, bringing him forward by the hand: my son-in-law, an oriental prince (as The Table, she knew, used to laugh about her pickup behind her back) in Gucci shoes. Armani pants and Ralph Lauren shirt Danielle’s bought him, his beauty is an exotic dish to sample along with the pool-side lunch. He’s still wearing his old elegant scarf round his neck. All that is left of him. Whatever he was, had been, is? Sliding himself out from under the vehicle, sitting in silent judgment upon us at The Table, flung upon his back on the bed in the cottage, now carefully repacking the canvas bag in the lean-to. What was it she’d read. There was a poet’s novel, she didn’t remember the title or the writer, The Table poet had given her, insisted she must read—something in it was dredged up now its time came to be understood: for her to understand what she had done. ‘I was occupied in picturing him to myself; I had undertaken the task of imagining him.’ But he is himself. Nobody’s task. Tell it to the desert; that is safe. Each time she faced the desert from the stump of a wall and then rose and walked out a way, never too far, could be the last time; meanwhile she was continuing to do what she had discovered she could do, occupied her final days as she had since she bought the two air tickets and came with him here, to his place. Right up to the date they boarded the plane, she would continue; it was her small farewell gift to the school children, leaving them with another few words of the language he had to apply himself to acquire more fluently if he were to get what he wanted where he and she were going. It was her small way of thanking the conversational tea circle and others who had come to her, for— well—their need of her.
There is no last time, for the desert. The desert is always. It does not matter that she has turned and gone back up the street, buying three circles of warm fritters from the vendor as she returns to the family home, the lean-to for transients.
Out to buy fritters.
They decided together, often disagreeing and then giving in, each indulgent to the other, on what to take and what to leave behind. Some abandonments were reversed.
One of the brass trays? Just that little one. If you can squash it in at the bottom.
They regarded each other mock-questioningly a moment, laughed. With Maryam she had bought a supplementary suitcase at the market, a cardboard affair with tin locks instead of the digital combination one on the elegant suitcase. His mother, through Maryam as emissary, had provided two sets of flower-patterned bed sheets as a start, wherever they might find the next bed, and it was not possible to distribute these discreetly, like the other ‘wedding presents’ they couldn’t carry.
All right. Between my mother’s sheets, if you want.
They wrapped the family Koran like a mummy, to protect it in his canvas bag, and then discussed whether it wouldn’t be safer to have it in the cabin. She taped it once again in plastic film so that toothpaste or deodorant, which might leak under pressure changes in an aircraft, could not harm it in her overnight pouch.
What about that perfume stuff the women gave you. You like that.
No … no, Maryam and Khadija have it, I know from experience what can happen with perfume … and those phials don’t have proper stoppers. I wouldn’t think of putting them in there with the Book. And the sheets—you’d never get the scent out.
Her books, her humble Koran, were all that was left to be packed; they went into the cardboard case; Ahmad, handyman of the family, home from the butcher’s yard, supplied a length of rope and strapped the case to take the strain off cheap locks. He remarked something to his brother and he and Ibrahim both exclaimed and laughed.
What does he say?
Ibrahim’s face crumpled wryly. Emigrant’s case. It must break… if it even gets to the other side. Piece of rubbish.
And now there was nothing left, of them, him and her, in the lean-to, except the bed they still slept in, made love in, for a few more days. He had insisted that they should be ready, no object, nothing to look back for, roll out the elegant case (it has wheels, of course), pick up the canvas bag and the cardboard acquisition and walk out to the taxi already ordered in advance for when the day and hour came; so he had them on the point of de
parture three days ahead of the day.
That night, after he had slipped from her body and rills left of her pleasure had ended, she spoke; but then sensed from the rhythm of his breathing that his silence did not mean he had heard what she feared and shamed herself with so that she could hardly goad herself to say what she had to say. He was asleep.
Just say the word
It was better perhaps to be less cowardly and not choose the dark, where you would not have to see the other’s face. More honest in the morning. They were dressing two days before their departure for America when she chose the moment, the close space of the lean-to round them when his brother had long left for the butchery, his other brother had gone to his post at the café, the women in the kitchen, except Khadija probably still in bed, the children, little Leila, off to school, and the mother—the mother perhaps at her prayer rug asking divine help to protect her son on his endless journey— that was the moment to say to him, not with I have something to tell you as a useless preparation, but directly, right out for what was between them; I am not going.
Where’s it you’re supposed to go?
For him, they’ve already left this place; but she might have one of the women she’d known here who expected still to see her.
I am not going—coming to America.
What is it you’re saying?
His voice was normal, as if sometimes when he needed a simplified phrase for something she had said in English.
I’m not going to America.
Of course you are going to America. On Thursday.
No. I’m not going.
Julie, what are you afraid of? What are these nerves. You are never like this.
He is ready to come to her, embrace her, soothe her, they must get away from here, this place has taken the spirit out of her.
Her hands are up, palms open, fingers splayed, holding him off. No. It’s not that. I’m not going.
What is she, who is she now, this woman who beckoned him to her, if ever a woman did, who followed him to this place—bewilderment, rage, what is it you feel that you never knew before, never would get yourself into this kind of provocation. Are you mad? His whisper is louder than a yell. You have gone out of your head. We are going on Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. That’s it.
Chapter 43
Are you mad? Are you mad? Saliva filled his mouth, spit flew from his lips. Her silence was a wall of obduracy he could not pummel his fists against. He flung himself from the space that held them, stumbling against the iron bedstead, the chair, the obstacle of the charged canvas bag as he made for the door: it was too flimsy to bang behind him, he stood faced with the communal room of his mother’s house, aware at his back that she—the girl who picked him up, the lover, the faithful follower, the wife—could see him there through the gap of the sagging board. The family room was deserted; the sofa from which his mother surveyed all was unoccupied by her form. He did not know what he was looking for, for whom; if he had come out to look for—what? The one certainty in a life—it is not known until it suddenly is not there. And what does that mean? That his mother was not there for him on her throne; not now, this moment, not when he is in Africa, England, Germany, in Chicago, Detroit, not ever. That she, everything she has been, lover, follower at his heels, something called wife; she is not there. Not in the cottage, the café where she lured him for coffee, not on the iron bedstead in the lean-to, not in America. Not ever.
He did not want to see them, any of the family, no-one; and he needed at once someone. Anyone upon whom to lay ‘I’m not going’. To see from outside the self the effect of this statement. But it is never ‘anyone’ who is being sought; unacknowledged, in the deviousness, the reluctance to admit what is lodged deep, it is someone. He passed the warm voices coming from the kitchen; no, no, not the women; he found himself approaching the angle of privacy in the passage: but she was at prayer, his mother, her head bowed to her mat. He was the small boy who had burst upon her with the tale of a lost ball when she was in the middle of her devotions and had been shamed by reprimand; he slowed and turned away without her being aware of him.
And it happened to be Maryam he came upon. As he stood, back in the room the whole family lived in, every chair and cushion moulded to their weight, worn places on the carpet designed by the concourse of their feet, Maryam came smiling greeting to him on her way to the front door, leaving to clean her employer’s house. What she saw in his face and stance made her halt where she was; immediately she thought of some accident or illness in the family that somehow had been kept from her. So many dear ones, Ahmad working with knives at the butcher’s yard—she lived by tender concern for all. —What is wrong? What happened. Julie?—
—Nothing.—
—But you are— She feels her intrusion.
—Just woke up, that’s all.—
But he had now been assaulted from within by something he had not said, unable to think beyond Are you mad in response to a single meaning of I’m not going. Not going to Chicago, to Detroit, to California.
He left Maryam looking aside from him in her tact, and burst back to the lean-to, dragging the door shut behind him.
She was standing at the window. She turned with the agony of composure drawn in tight lines between her brows and around her mouth.
So you’re going back. There. Where you come from. I thought it all the time. One day. The day will be that you go home where you always say is not your home. But you see I was right. You do not know what you say. That is how it is with you. So you don’t know what you do. To people. Good luck. Goodbye. Tell them all at the Café, this shack you live in, this dirty place, and tell them you’re too good, you’re very fine, you won’t what is it—sell out, they say— you don’t live with the capitalists in California, tell them, you’ll think of everything to tell. Goodbye. Go and tell. Goodbye.
He began transformed by anger, his face dyed with rising blood, his eyes narrowed to chips of black glitter, his body strangely gathered as if to spring, and ended—as if by a knife thrust within himself—in dejection.
She was afraid of the dejection, not the anger which she had, his violent breath—taken in with open mouth. She came to him, stumbling as he had done over their baggage and he tried to fend off her hands and arms as she clung to him. Don’t say. Don’t say.
No right, hers, to say now what was eloquently unsaid ever since—certainly the first nights in the doll’s house—I love you.
Listen to me. Where did you get the idea. I’m not going back there. I don’t belong there.
She has taken his head between her hard palms and forced his face before her, she feels his texture, the nap of a day’s growth of beard against her skin. She has the image of him, one of those habitual and dear, pressing his tongue against the inner side of his cheek to tauten the flesh as he delicately shaves round his moustache; the image stored.
You know that. Saying both at once: the unsaid (that stored image is love) and what has been said, I’m not going back.
What are you talking? What is it. You are not going to America. That’s what you say. You are not going to your home. That is what you say.
And now she has to tell him what she thought he must have understood. I’m staying here.
Chapter 44
The passion of dispute that erupts like this abandons intimacy that has been respected; through the makeshift door of the lean-to it flowed to the family living-room, through the whole house, invading, overtaking the preoccupations and concerns of all who lived so closely there; as if each, even the children, looked up from these, through the day, as at a sudden sound or sight. What happens between man and wife, that’s their business, it is customary to maintain the principle of privacy even to the extent of appearing to be unaware that anything is happening. In a house crowded with relatives this is particularly stringent; not only the door of the lean-to is too thin. The surface conventions of blood ties and religious observance are able to contain subsumed almost without a ripple, for example,
the presence of Khadija and its implications. But whatever is happening in the lean-to is different, it thrusts itself in demand upon the house. As son, brother, cousin he has no option, no other resource but to come out and repeat to each relative the same account of what has happened in that lean-to—from where she, the foreign wife he brought to them, does not appear, either because she accepts that he speak for her, or because he does not allow her to speak for herself. Who can say. But even when her favourite, the small Leila, is seen by him making for the lean-to door, he sends the child away.
Everyone is confronted with this account, even those who are only embarrassed and bewildered by a situation they cannot understand, they shouldn’t be admitted to. Something that belongs to the life of this family member so different from theirs, lived unimaginably in worlds they do not know. As if he could expect some explanation, support, from them in their innocence, the ignorance he has always made them aware they live in. His brothers Ahmad and Daood listen to him in disbelief, a woman does what her husband says. They are too loyal to him, too respectful, to reveal what this makes him immediately alert to again: the stigma on his manhood. The women—she’d now joined them, the kitchen was the neutral ground from which to take the right of entry by way of household tasks, playing with their children, exchanging pidgin-language—when he approached the women their embarrassment emanated from them like sweat. It was from their gathering under the awning they spoke at all. She is a very good person. It will be all right. She will do what is right, she is a wife. Sometimes we just get upset, you know, for a while, then it passes, ma sha allah.
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