An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

  * * *

  She and Ethan were waiting in a square called Piazza della Passera. It was quaint, cobblestoned, with an island of trees at its center and restaurants along its edges. Patio umbrellas clustered over groups of two and three and four, laughing and toasting and eating, the evening sky peeking through the gaps among the umbrellas.

  Safia closed her eyes. She saw the pebble again, disappearing into the water. “I feel like a pebble,” she said aloud.

  Ethan gave her a look of incomprehension; his eyes squinted and he opened his mouth, but then he corrected it into a strained smile, as if he’d reminded himself—as he seemed to be doing every few minutes—that they were in Florence, that they were on holiday, and what a joy it was: to be here with his wife on their third anniversary. The strongest number, he’d mentioned, as they were packing. “You can’t knock over something with three legs,” he’d said. Yes, she hoped it was true, the bit about the three legs.

  “It won’t be long now,” he said cheerily. “We’ve been here over an hour.” Safia passed her gaze over the diners. Most of them were chattering away in Italian. There were a few American couples, and one group of Germans. They were the only mixed couple. She noted that, and then she turned away from the diners. A little light remained in the sky, but that too soon crumbled. The hostess, a lithe Italian woman with curly hair, brushed past them.

  Safia heard approaching laughter, and when she looked across the square, a cadre of young men was crossing it. They seemed about the same age as them, Safia and Ethan, hardly much younger, but they walked and laughed with such ease, such brazenness. She steadied her voice, told herself she couldn’t scream, that she wouldn’t. “Oxford, do you think, or Cambridge?” she asked.

  Ethan, who’d been reading the menu for the past ten minutes, whipped around to look at her. “How do mean?”

  “Where do you think she would’ve gone? Oxford or Cambridge?”

  Ethan’s eyes widened then narrowed. He was quiet. Safia thought how very different he was just a few months ago. Before Minoo died. His eyes, back then, would not have blazed so blue. They would’ve been serene, like sea glass, and he would’ve winked and said, “Harvard, you goose.”

  But now, after a long moment—during which it seemed to Safia that all the voices and clinking and laughter in the square died, as if a curtain were lifted and a sudden hush had fallen over an audience—did he say, softly, “Safia, she’s gone. She’s gone.”

  Her eyes grew warm. She wished he hadn’t said them so softly, those words, she wished he had screamed them. Their softness made them so true. “I’m just asking, is all,” she managed to say. It wasn’t long before the hostess motioned for them to follow her and led them to a table on the outer ring of the umbrellas. Ethan seated himself with a sigh. He looked at her and fiddled with a fork that was set on a white folded napkin. “We can get through this,” he said. Safia nodded. She tried to smile. It was just like him these days to say such a thing. To say something so bland, so thin, so rustic. And so utterly untrue.

  * * *

  Grief, she repeated to herself.

  * * *

  Ethan ordered melanzane alla parmigiana, insalata caprese, a plate of pasta stuffed with taleggio cheese and pear, and a bottle of Chianti. The waiter said, “Perfetto, signore. Mille grazie,” and went away. There was a little boy at another table, fussing and dropping spoons. Safia tried hard not to look at him. She could see the mother, bending to pick them up, losing her patience. She turned away.

  The wine arrived. It was poured into two of those squat glasses they used on the Continent, as if to say they were past the stem, past all the secrets of wine, and into its wild and crimson heart. Ethan raised his glass. “To us,” he said. Safia smiled and looked through the gap in the umbrellas. None of it was even his fault (was it?), but she could hardly look at him. Even with her eyes closed she could see the striations on his neck, the reddish blond hair spiking out of his skin like desert thorns, weeds that you pluck and pluck against a dry desert sky and they spring up again and again as though they had a will of their own, a will so endless and untamed she thought it might choke her in the night.

  “Your granddad Mustafa,” he was saying, holding his glass against the lantern on the table. “Eight, did you say?”

  “Nine.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Imagine. Nine,” Ethan said, his voice rising with interest.

  Safia thought of Minoo. Lying there in her crib, the day before she’d died, as if for all the world she would learn to walk, and to talk, and to whirl through life with the same laughter and glory that was in this square, and that she would be protected, always, as if by these umbrellas.

  “Not a word?”

  Safia shook her head. She took a sip of her wine. Her grandfather’s story was something of family lore, gathered in bits and pieces: he’d been on a train, crossing from Pakistan into India. He was already an orphan, his parents having been killed by a Hindu mob months earlier. And as if that were not enough, the train he was on had been looted then torched. He had been the only person to survive, and had not spoken a word since.

  * * *

  The insalata arrived. Ethan heaped the mozzarella and cubes of tomato onto his plate. The olive oil, in the lantern light, slipped and glowed like gold. Safia thought of him—she thought of his efficiency. It was terrifying, it was maddening, this efficiency of his. At the hospital, afterward, he’d been the one to call both sets of parents, to call work, to call the mortuary, to call, call, call. Safia had watched him. At first she hadn’t understood, she couldn’t even hear, and so she’d asked him, “Who are you calling?” She didn’t hear his response but she remembered searching her mind. So suddenly airy and weightless. Who was there to call? Her baby daughter was dead. Who should she call? All of that hospital, all of London was empty. All the world, really. She could pass a hand through the steel and concrete pillars in the waiting room of the hospital, she could topple with a flick of her fingers the coarse, useless bodies, bloated with life that squirmed past her. Call? On their way out of the hospital they passed the chapel and she said aloud, into the dim of its open door, “You? Not you. You died when she did.”

  * * *

  Two years after Safia’s excursion on the ferry with her grandfather, she and her parents moved to London from Lahore. They moved in with an uncle who lived in Croydon, and Safia started school at the Coloma Convent Girls’ School. She didn’t know more than three words of English when she arrived but by the end of the year she had forgotten nearly all her Urdu, having replaced it with a gleaming new language that she tossed around as easily as a ball. “Do you want to go back to Lahore?” her mother asked her toward the end of their second year. Safia knew why she was asking: her father was nearly finished with his graduate degree and in order to remain in England he’d have to apply for a post-study work visa. Otherwise they’d have to return to Lahore. She’d heard her mother and father talking deep into the night about whether to stay or go. The money was better, of course, and life was easier in London, but occasionally her mother would whisper, with a small and plaintive voice, “But Jannu, Lahore is home.”

  It had been raining all morning, but by the time her mother posed the question to Safia it had stopped, though the clouds still clung low and dark. Safia was watching Noddy and Big Ears on television. Her mother pulled her onto her lap, but Safia continued watching, peeking at the screen through her mother’s sheer chunni. She brushed a strand of hair from Safia’s face; her fingers smelled of garlic and mutton and ghee, and faintly sweet like cinnamon. “What do you think?” she asked. “Do you want to go back to Lahore?” Safia lowered her head and pretended to think. She concentrated on the voices coming from the television, and tried to recall all the things she remembered about Lahore. She saw the peepal tree in their old garden, and she remembered that her socks used to slip down her calves during morning exercises. The teacher had once rapped her on the wrist with a ruler for stopping to pull them up. She remembe
red her grandfather, the rickety old ferry, and the strangeness of that day. She remembered the distant shore that couldn’t even keep a baby from crying, let alone her grandfather. “I want to stay,” she finally said and knew immediately that it was the wrong answer: her mother’s face swung as dark and low as the clouds, and even at that age—even at the age when every beginning has a rightness to it—Safia knew this was the wrong way to begin.

  * * *

  Maybe it was the white of his skin that disgusted her.

  She leaned in to have a closer look. My god, why had she never noticed? That field of pink pores, grotesque how they swayed and shivered like jelly when he chewed. Like uncooked flesh. Uncooked flesh: that was the true horror. That it was unfinished, unmade. Sitting on a counter. The white like runny tapioca, like maggots.

  Ethan looked at her. “Why aren’t you eating?”

  She took a bite. She swallowed it. He’d proposed this trip to Italy and when she’d asked him why, he’d said, “I’m concerned.”

  “Concerned?”

  “Wouldn’t you be? All you do is sit in the flat. You don’t go out, you don’t pick up the phone. Do you even eat?”

  “Do you think it’s right,” she asked him after a few bites, “that we lost a child before the third leg?”

  It took him a moment to understand but she knew he did when he wrapped his hand into a slow fist. Safia put down her fork. She thought then that she should take it, his hand, his fist, and kiss every knuckle. Move over those mountainous stretches of skin—white and taut with rage—her lips lingering, breathing in what was left, what might be salvaged. But she only sat there, looking at it. She had no arms to reach out. No lips with which to kiss. And that rage: she felt it too.

  * * *

  They stayed. Safia and her parents moved into their own flat in New Malden and her father took a job as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. Her mother stayed at home. Safia changed schools, and changed once again when her father took up the post as head chemist at a company in Twickenham. Safia was barely aware of her parents; she spent most of her time reading Anna Karenina, staring out of schoolroom windows, and wondering what it would be like to kiss Count Vronsky.

  On her sixteenth birthday Safia and one of her classmates snuck out and went dancing at an underage club in London Bridge. One of the boys on the dance floor—some boy who’d been watching them all night and looked West African, the thick lips, the piercing white eyes against the dark of his skin, who made Safia think that the race of men would continue on and on, that death was no match against the beauty of such men—leaned down and said, “Follow me.”

  She did. He led her to a small room next to the loo. He edged her against the wall, with its dull pink wallpaper stained and peeling against her back. Then he kissed her. Just like that. As if she’d asked him to. He smiled and said, “You’re cute. But that friend of yours, the blondie, now she’s a stunner.”

  Safia stared up at him.

  “Think you could get her over here?”

  She yanked her arm away from him. “Khusra,” she yelled into his face. She smiled faintly; so she remembered some Urdu, after all.

  “What?” he said. “I said you were cute, didn’t I?”

  She pushed past him and through the line of people waiting for the loo. “Eh, eh,” he yelled after her, “you Paki slag. What’s got into you?”

  Safia looked back. The bright of his eyes still shone through the crowd of people, but then someone passed in front of him and she was sucked again into the mass of bodies, and in that moment she had a strange and unsettling intimation. A trace of something she’d always sensed, of something her mother had long ago said, and of a thing that that African boy knew: that she wasn’t home. That home wasn’t Lahore, and that it wasn’t London. Not really. And that home had never been a thing she’d found. It was a thing she’d lost.

  * * *

  It was eleven o’clock. The melanzane hadn’t yet arrived. Ethan looked at his watch. “You think we’ll make it?”

  Safia took a sip of her wine. They were staying at a monastery in the Oltrarno. “It’s architecturally significant, Safia. You should appreciate that. From the time of the Medicis,” Ethan had insisted. And it was charming: the narrow streets, the artisan shops, well away from the tourists and crowds north of the Arno. Florence, too, delighted her. She wandered the churches, the Duomo, stood in front of the religious paintings at the Uffizi, and tried to find a single piece of art that didn’t derive its beauty from suffering. The suffering of a mother, mainly. She couldn’t. The monastery itself was full of Renaissance-era frescoes, and there was the pleasure, unexpected and lovely, of being woken from a nap by evening vespers. And though it had a nightly curfew, midnight, they’d reasoned—searching the Internet a month ago in their London flat—that it would hardly be a problem getting back before such a late hour. The waiter, whom Ethan tried to summon, was busy seating a group of six at a table next to theirs. “What an hour to begin eating,” he said with wonder.

  Safia looked through the umbrellas at the stars.

  Maybe it was punishment. Maybe people of different races weren’t meant to marry. Maybe their babies died. The thought made sense, in a way. We’d roamed away from each other all those hundreds of thousands of years ago; there must’ve been a reason. There must’ve been an explanation. But it was ridiculous, of course; she had loads of friends who’d married out of race and had had beautiful healthy babies who cooed and gurgled and woke up in the mornings.

  Had she done something wrong? Her mother had been so ashamed she hadn’t told anyone of her engagement to Ethan for three months. Her father hadn’t spoken to her for two. Her grandfather had blinked, and looked away. But that had been years ago, before the wedding. And back then she’d been young; she’d thought weathering something was like passing a moment, like waiting in a rain. Eventually, sooner or later, you knew you’d find yourself inside, by a warm fire, in dry clothes. Now she knew better: weathering was a thing that had nothing to do with rain and nothing to do with fire. It was you, anywhere—in warmth, in rain, on a ferry on the Ravi, in a square in Florence—it was you, everywhere, in all the palaces of the world, broken.

  * * *

  She left secondary school and studied architecture at London South Bank, doing moderately well but without the zeal of her fellow students. After graduation she landed an internship with a small architectural firm in Kings Cross and moved into a flat with two other women. Within the first week at her new job she was restless. “All I do is design the bloody boil-in-bag aisle at Marks and Spencer,” she complained to one of her roommates, Tabitha, “and even that as an assistant. The team leader said to me today, actually said to me, Tab, he said, ‘Safia, you’re not taking boil-in-bag very seriously, are you?’ What does he want me to do? Shag one? That’s what I should do. Design an aisle for shag-a-bag.” Safia was drunk, and her team leader was Ethan. Within a year they’d secretly moved in together—on the other side of London from Safia’s parents and without telling them—and Safia had left the firm to pursue a course in art history. But that too came to nothing and by the time they were married Ethan was telling his friends and family that Safia was “exploring her options.”

  But Safia was doing nothing of the sort. She wasn’t exploring; she was waiting. And though she wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, she decided that waiting, even when it had no clear end, was a fine way to spend one’s time. It even held a certain inexplicable charm. Then her waiting was over: a year and a half after they were married Safia was pregnant.

  * * *

  Ethan wiped up the last bits of melanzane with bread. It was forty minutes till midnight. Safia thought for a moment that it might be nice not making it back by curfew. They’d have to sleep in one of the squares. Or on a bench along the Arno. Maybe even huddled under one of the trees in the Boboli Gardens. But somewhere without a roof. That was the part that most delighted her. She pictured it: the soft summer breeze, the thick blanket of stars, t
he scent of water. She’d never slept in such a place and it beckoned her in the way Minoo’s cries had beckoned her: with a thrill, a rush of sorrow, concern, and such a sudden and electric feeling of life that the hair on her arms stood on end.

  A young couple walked past them, eating gelato.

  “I think she would’ve preferred it,” Safia said, “to ice cream, I mean. What do you think?”

  Ethan began to speak but then seemed to change his mind. It was so like him these days, Safia thought. Talking and talking but then silencing himself when something so needed to be said. It mattered, didn’t it? Whether she would’ve liked ice cream or gelato, whether she would’ve gone to Oxford or Cambridge.

  The pasta arrived. When Ethan cut open a ravioli the thick milky taleggio oozed out like sea foam, studded with glistening shavings of pear. He took a bite. “Saf, you gotta try this,” he said, holding up a forkful.

  She looked at him. His thick fingers, the dripping pasta, the cold of the metal. What would it feel like—that fork—scraping against her neck, her wrist, her heart. And that knife, the ones the Italians were using to cut their steaks, what would that feel like gliding along the inside of her thigh. It would make a line; she could draw a map. And that would be the true country. Not this one, and not the one she lived in, and not the one she’d left.

  “I think I’ll just have some coffee,” she said. He nodded, looked at his watch. They had twenty minutes left.

  * * *

  Safia looked through the gap in the umbrellas. The stars spun. They rattled in the sky like bones.

  * * *

  Ethan paid the bill and looked again at his watch. “Safia, we’ve gotta go,” he said, springing from his chair. “Now!”

  They dashed out of the Piazza della Passera. Down the Via Maggio. Across the church of Santo Spirito. The narrow streets and alleys rang with their footsteps. She’d occasionally spy a lighted square at the end of a side alley, or the sounds of a television streaming out of an open window, but mostly the streets were deserted. And for all the world they were the only ones left in it.