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Dry Season

Page 9

by Gabriela Babnik


  He finally decided on a third option, which I did not expect. He picked up the remote for the TV, turned it off, and faced me head on. Now I knew what was coming. ‘You tink I am fool? Two-tree days you have disappear, and now you talk me notting but dat she is soft?’

  I shrugged; yah, soft. He wanted a story from me, all the way from our shoulders touching at the hotel, from ‘you were looking at me’, ‘I saw you looking at me too, what do we do now?’, right up to the moment in the bathroom when she took off her panties under the shower, one quick yank, and what had been there before was not there anymore – but my tongue was stuck in my throat. Like it was sewn in.

  ‘Do you no screw wit me,’ he said a moment later, completely calm. ‘You tink dat I no know dat da white women be more soft dan our women? And dat dey shave deir legs, and sometime da bush too next to dat tank dey have...’

  I did not know if I wanted to listen to him, but I decided to wait a little, a minute or two, then get up and leave. I took my feet off the table and leaned forward. I had not come to Malik’s to watch his colour TV, even less to talk about Ana’s back and the bird in my belly pecking at my live flesh, but to bring him a message from Baba. He wanted to see him, to talk to him about something very serious. I suspected it had to do with the organized burglaries. Stay close to him, but not too close, Baba had said. The boy is like a snake, he will suck the blood out of you, rip your guts apart, then toss you away. I do not even know how I could father such a son. He was ashamed of him, not so much for Malik’s sake as his own, for the sake of the family this high-spirited twenty-five-and-something-year-old had completely bewildered. You are a good boy, Baba blew on my soul, something will come of you – although I was not entirely sure about that. Especially not after Ana told me she was going to the bathroom and then ran onto the street.

  ‘She no have in her bag notting but a photo, shoes, keys.’ I said this to stop Malik’s fuckmaster monologue and give him something to chew on after all. ‘I no have take da keys but I get da picture of her son in A6 format.’

  He reached out his hand, but before I put mine in my pocket, I made him wait a second. The picture would not mean anything to Malik; he could not blackmail Ana with it, but the bird inside me was whispering that it was the most precious thing in the world. At least to her.

  ‘Man, dat dude he look stupid stupid,’ Malik howled at the picture, as if a living person was standing in front of him. ‘What a big big queerboy...’

  I ripped it from his hands and then on the table, where not long before our Sahelian feet had been resting, I tossed a pair of lacy panties, burgundy red. In the back, in the middle, a sparkling stone had been sewn on, but I had torn it off earlier and stuffed it in my pocket. Whenever I thought of Ana I would finger it; I almost threw it away once, but then I let it stay there. It was not good that we met. Like Malik said – he was now staring at me with his mouth open, I guess because I had managed to get so far with a white woman, I guess because at that moment I had almost become his equal, which had never happened before – she should have been at some Sunday picnic. Sitting on a heavy wooden bench and watching children from a distance. All those Russian women, too, should be doing the same thing, Malik’s included. There had to be something horribly wrong. Not exactly that they were driving a tank between their legs, but something else. I will ask the bird when it is about to fly away, but now it is just there and does not want out.

  * * *

  Back in the day, I was obsessed with recycled clothes. After switching from scarves to interiors, I found myself being drawn back. I started bringing stones, shells, pictures, leaves, tiny little figures, even toys into the studio and would piece together clothes out of them. I loved dresses made of paper, fastened behind with a big bow, or hooped skirts made from teabags. It would take me a month or so to make them and then I hid them behind a folding screen. I didn’t intend for anyone to see them, least of all my husband. So I almost had a heart attack when after the wedding he asked me if I would move to his place. If I did, I would have to throw away all the dresses lying around the studio, or if not throw them away then at least share my personal obsession, my preoccupation, my freedom, or whatever else you might call my need to draw. But I didn’t know if I was ready for something like that, or if I could endure having someone silently enter my field of darkness, or would know how to say nothing when it was time to say nothing and how to speak up when I was forced to defend myself, to defend my art. In the end, of course, I made a compromise, or at least I thought I did, and hoped I wouldn’t be found out.

  I started living with him but kept thirty square metres as a refuge. I would rise at the crack of dawn and tell him I was going off to sew, or to cover chairs. He would lean over to me, kiss me lightly, maybe even think my cheek is soft as my inner thighs, but even as he thought such thoughts he’d be wearing an expression that said he didn’t believe me, or at least didn’t believe in what I did, didn’t consider my work real – oh please, artistic creation, you can’t live off that – and with his hand raised in goodbye, would leave to do his work. Had we lived in a house, I would have leaned against the kitchen counter and watched his departing figure through the window, but since we didn’t live in a house, not then, I merely leaned against the front door; then I wiped off my makeup and removed the narrow skirt, the kind professional seamstresses supposedly wore.

  There was nowhere I belonged, neither this flat nor my parents’ house. Maybe the woman who brought me to the orphanage knew all of this. Knew that I’d slip a plaid coat over my tights and tunic and ride my bicycle to my studio. That once there, I’d free myself of clothes and, before sewing toys onto felt, or snakeskin on the cuff of a glove, I would sit in my work chair, spread my legs like a hooker and, before entering my deep, tender immersion, would rub my neck. A gesture I’d been making unconsciously for years and years. It wasn’t until my mother asked me why I always had to wear high collars that I became aware of it. My husband noticed nothing and I truly don’t know why I was hiding from him. Was it that I didn’t want to disappoint him, and even before him, didn’t want to disappoint my mother? Was it that no one, neither in his family nor in mine, considered printed fabrics as work, so I was constantly forced to apologize because I didn’t have to go to a factory since in fact I already had a job? When I really think about it, it was mainly gratitude. Given the condition I was in when my parents found me, I constantly felt a need to be grateful. And I showed it. By returning from England, by staying in that little, too little, city, and by drawing turquoise flowers on its pallid face.

  I only became more relaxed when they allowed me to hire a girl in the studio. I say allowed because for a while my mother was against the idea. She had been sewing all her life with her own two hands, she said. It was clear from her tone she was afraid I’d become stuck-up. But when I convinced her that this was how it’s done in England, was how it’s done all over the world, that there are people who hire other people, she relented. Maybe she even thought I would ask her, but my mother and me – how should I explain it? I gave in to her on the electrician, but the idea that she should also deprive me of my time of unbuttoned skin, this was simply too much.

  I don’t know what I was thinking back then. That recycled clothes, natural materials, linen, cotton, especially cotton, silk, leather – they would cleanse me? That through them I’d return to the source of my being? That in pleats of silk I’d find the person who deposited me at the orphanage? I installed mirrors on two sides of my studio, laid a rug between them, a few plants, and told the girl she could make herself at home. Together we traced patterns onto fabric; the rest I did myself. If she made a seam or two too big, we unstitched them and resewed them. I never yelled at her, just as at the beginning my electrician didn’t yell at me. Only sometimes, when I came back late from the studio and my skin showed no marks from clothing, he wanted to make love to me. Right there, on the balcony of the flat. I tossed my bag on the sofa, undid my coat
, quickly slipped off my tights, and opened the glass doors. Leaning on the balcony railing, I tried to make out the figures of the people below us, until from behind I became aware that he had brought me a cup of warm tea. At moments like this I knew we had more than other couples. He could have made me stay home, could have deprived me – like so many other husbands do, out of concern, of course, for family, home, love – of the meaning my work gave to me, and of course he could almost have never kissed me, let alone kissed me tenderly. I turned half way to face him and then it struck me, he got this from his parents, this style, I mean, not to say condescension, whenever he wanted something from me.

  I remained in this half-facing position and tried to tell myself it was the paper dress, really, which took up half the balcony, that was preventing me from turning around.

  ‘You’re looking beautiful today,’ he said and lifted my hair off my neck, stroked the nape – obviously, he knew this would trigger in me certain unconscious processes – and placed his lips there. I responded. My body turned to him on its own, to his hands, which were losing control. I thought of my mother’s hands, which had supposedly done everything themselves, and the hands of the person who deposited me. I don’t remember anything, what colour hair she had, whether she was short or tall, not a thing. It might even have been a man. The only thing that remained glowing in my brain was a bit of silk, probably a sleeve. Antique silk sewn on the cuff, and although I wasn’t even sure I had ever seen it, I felt all the same that this momentary scene had marked me. Linen, cotton, especially cotton, silk, leather, almost anything that smelled historical. And I suppose it wasn’t about recycled clothes at all but about the smell of the past that had eluded me. ‘Shall we have a baby?’

  The words came slowly, cautiously, out of his mouth. He was still holding up my hair. If I had had eyes at the back of my head, I would have seen him making it into a fig-shaped bun. Something unconscious on his part. Seen, too, that the day had tilted into evening. That the light had reached the top of the glass doors, in which the cup of now-cold tea was reflected. At a distance, on the other side, lay my secret stockings. It occurred to me that I needed to take down the folding screen in the studio. The girl and I had started hanging the dresses from the ceiling, so they hovered above us like headless corpses, but actually the space had long ago become too small. At times I even started feeling like my hanging designs were suffocating us; then I would stretch up, pull one down, put it on in an instant, drape my coat over it, wave to the girl, who didn’t understand anything anyway, least of all my silent battle with my family, go down the stairs, and get on my bicycle. One of the charms of these dresses was that they always stayed unfinished. They only become finalized when filled by a body. And the body had to be mine.

  ‘I’m sorry. What did you say?’ I felt him unravelling the fig, felt my hair falling back on my shoulders; he turned away, like my father may have once turned from my mother, although people are always turning their back on someone, and after standing there a moment, he went inside the flat. I thought he was going to take my plaid coat off the stand and throw it on the floor – this was something he had done before; it wasn’t all gentle bowing and kissing on the inner thighs – but instead he went toward the kitchen. I leaned far out over the balcony and tried to catch a glimpse of a woman – or was it a man? I wasn’t sure – who I thought was wearing silverish football boots and white sports socks, but before she, or he, crossed the street my husband came back to the balcony with a chilled bottle of wine in his hand. He adjusted his hair, which covered half his forehead – I should have done it, but he did it himself – and then at a distance gave me another hug. As if a hooped dress or bow of rustling gold paper was between us.

  ‘I’d like to have a baby girl with you. A tiny baby girl, who would fill your time when I’m not around.’ Sometimes he talked so confusingly, so much like an industrialist, that it lost me. I wanted to say, what about my studio and my botanical prints and the new girl, but I bit my tongue. He said he was going away – he was, by himself. There was no ‘we’ in his thinking, at least not in one room. ‘I’ve been invited to draw up a plan for an artificial lake; they want a hydroelectric plant...’

  ‘The baby will need her father,’ I whispered. If it weren’t for that feeling of gratitude – for being picked up, put in a car, and driven to a real home with a real kitchen, a living room and a bathroom, for being picked up at all, despite my father by the window showing his back to my mother in her narrow seamstress’s skirt and white blouse – I’d have said, not what I actually muttered, but that I didn’t want a child, that I had my dresses, after all, my immersion, which you would never see into, although now you didn’t understand that yet, didn’t understand that I would never allow you to look into my hands, to look into the darkness of my spread-out legs when I created, not worked but created, sculptures from discarded materials, from linen, cotton, silk, leather, but behind the spoken words there remained silence. He was a little surprised, could barely hold on to the bottle; now that I’d said no, there was nothing to drink to. But instead of staying angry, I felt sorry for him; this was probably the main thing that connected us, my compassion and his projections of what our life should be, of how it should be.

  I looked down over the railing one last time – the woman with the shiny sports shoes was long gone, if she was ever there, if it wasn’t really a man with long hair and a bouncy walk – and removed the dress that was between us. And to ease the tension a little, I added, ‘But we can go together and make a baby there, by some lake,’ although now it had lost all meaning. I understood this from his hidden tongue, which instead of laying claim to my papery tongue and finishing what it had started simply disappeared into the darkness of his oral cavity. I peered at myself over his shoulder, at the vacant, chrysalis-like look in my eyes, a look I would later repeat countless times, with him especially, who was clearly beginning to understand, even if he would not admit it to himself, that there were worlds inside me he could never enter – and a few moments later I was trying to find something to focus on, like the nylon stockings lying on the floor.

  * * *

  I had eaten earth earlier, even before Mama shoved it in my mouth. At the age of two or so. I was hungry and the earth was there. When I first ate it I was alone; then other children joined me. I remember we were all naked and had big bellies. There’s nothing literary or special about this, no magic realism, that is just how we were, how we behaved.

  My mama, for a time, was actually completely normal, so to speak. As much as you could be normal in that village. We lived between the church and the sweet potato fields. The women walked around with bare breasts; the men were bare down to the waist. I know how it sounds, but it is true. Nobody even imagined putting clothes on children. Once a week a lorry would drive past our huts, people and animals packed on it like sardines. Sometimes it stopped, and one of the villagers would hop on. The people on top would stretch out their arms and pull him up. I will never forget the smile on one person as he receded into the distance wrapped in a cloud of dust. His arm still hung in the air for a while, and then it stopped hanging. Of course I wanted them to pull me up too so I would not have to lick the earth anymore. It dawned on me later that the same things happen in the city, I mean things like hunger, but if I really had left, what would Mama have done without me? My birth was wrapped in mystery and I suspected more than knew that because of me she was showing her exposed breasts around the village. Why else did she keep her hand tucked in her waist when we were wrapped in that cloud of dust? She stood there like some goddess, half-closed her eyes and caught a calabash of water in the air. I imagined that only then was there a ripple on her smooth surface, never before and never after.

  I started running, running as fast as I could. Away from my wordless mama, who was betraying herself like that. Maybe it was not entirely a mistake that every now and then the villagers tied her to a post and spat on her. The only mistake was that th
ey added me too. Even as a little boy. She must have held on to me with one hand and closed my eyes with the other. So I would not see all the angry spirits telling us I really should not have come into this world without a father. I mean, I did have one – somebody must have squirted his semen into Mama’s belly; the only problem was we did not know who. And because Mama did not want to reveal his name – because, whether she was tied to the post or, like now, standing in the road, she would gaze toward the horizon – we had to be punished.

  Somewhere in the middle of the woods, though I do not know if it was right in the middle, I climbed a tree. I carried this light-brown, sun-scorched tree with me even later, in the city. Partridges flew back and forth through its branches, and sometimes a vulture might sit a while in the tree. To fill the loneliness I saw in Mama’s eyes when she gazed after the lorry, I would populate the woods, and the tree in the woods, with the spirits of birds and mice; I even thought up a dog, which the villagers said was sure to bring death; later, when I was a little older, I included people from the lorry. They had left physically, but parts of them, arms, legs, neck, hair, stayed with me. If I learned ahead of time that somebody was planning to go off to the city, I’d make sure I got a hair from his body or a piece of his clothing, and then I would burn it in the fire. As the smoke rose high into the sky, I would hum a vague melody under my breath and here and there insert the traitor’s name.

  Mama knew nothing of this. She did not know about the white dog that followed me into the woods, let alone that he showed me that thing among the trees. For a while we ran side by side, then he went ahead of me. When he came to a small bump in the ground, which from the distance I thought was just a rock or root, he started running in circles. But when I saw that his snout was covered in blood, I chased him away. If I had not chased him away, he would have licked not only the blood but also the guts and bones of a small creature that, I really could not be sure, was either a foetus half-eaten by flies and bugs or the body of a newborn baby.

 

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