Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  I didn’t take his hide-and-seek seriously at first. Nor did I tell anyone I thought my son seemed disturbed. The alarm bells didn’t go off until one night when he got drunk – he was a teenager at the time – and lay down on the train tracks. Early in the morning, pale and with a big head, bigger than his head normally was, he knocked on the bedroom door and said calmly that he had tried to commit suicide but failed. The train had braked in time. Angrily I threw off the covers, felt my heart beating in my chest, lowered my feet to the floor and at once slipped into my bathrobe, then indicated with my head that he should follow me to the kitchen. There, he suddenly took a knife out of the drawer and, just before he used it to cut into a loaf of bread, laughed out loud, and I saw that his two front teeth were missing. He may have been lying, of course, or it was a cry for help. But how can you help a teenager who is completely out of his mind? And maybe I would have known what to do if my husband hadn’t accused me of being a murderer. In his terry pyjamas, he suddenly jumped toward the kitchen table, with me standing in front of it lost and almost terrified – as if my parents, who I had been hiding from simply because I wanted a demonstration of their love, were about to drive away – and a moment later he placed himself behind my back, where he had a better view, better control, of the two of us.

  ‘Child-killer,’ he hissed out, a word that he had been repeating the whole time and which I was more or less used to by now. Then he turned to the fridge, opened it, and calmly took out a carton of milk and something else too, I don’t remember what; it could have been sugar, although we didn’t keep sugar in the fridge. Meanwhile, my son and I just stood there; we didn’t dare look each other in the eye. At least I didn’t. To be a child-murder is a terrible accusation, too terrible for any woman. Especially if your child is standing in front of you alive, telling you that you got away with it this time but next time you’ll get a life sentence.

  Standing in front of the knife he had just put down, or just used, as the case may be, I remembered, I don’t know why, one day when I was taking a shower in the bathroom with my son, who was still only an infant. We had just come from the pool. That, I think, was the first time I had taken him with me into the water. At first he was clinging to me, roughly, convulsively, the way only children can, but after a while he relaxed. I held him beneath his arms as he dragged his little legs behind him. We were playing in the shallow end when suddenly the floor of the pool gave way under my feet. I made a frightened expression and, although he was just a baby, he must have sensed that something was wrong. I pressed him to my face so my expression was mirrored in his; in the bathroom, however, under the shower, he was facing away from me, and when I tripped and, for a moment, passed out, he couldn’t see that I hadn’t done it on purpose. That moment when I was lying on the floor – I got a big scab on my scalp while the baby fell into a coma from which he woke up only a few hours later – gave my husband the upper hand. In his view, it was all my fault, but I expect that was only because I was a woman. Had it happened to him, it would have been simple inattentiveness, something that could happen to anybody. Nine months in my belly, giving birth, breastfeeding – all of that should have developed in me a special kind of attentiveness, if not clairvoyance. I should have known where the pool gets deeper, how wet the bathroom tiles are, and where the rim of the bathtub is that my foot blundered against.

  I didn’t think you were capable of it, but now I’m sure you did it, my husband in pyjamas insisted. I can’t imagine what a heavy burden of hate you’re carrying.

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ I screamed at him, although the wound was made. ‘How can you accuse me of child murder when that same child is standing here in front of us?’ As proof I pointed in the direction of our son’s head, which was becoming smaller now – were it not for his wet, sweat-soaked hair, I would have thought he was a child coming back to me, like he did that time in the ripened cornfield, who wanted to verify something, to prove something, but from the flush on his face I saw only that he was uncomfortable. By then, in that gloomy kitchen, which opened onto a narrow balcony, where in the late afternoons he and I would sit and read, I with my legs crossed, my eyeglasses in my left hand, he with his fine, artistic draughtsman’s fingers on the binding of a book – he didn’t have more than fourteen or fifteen books – his body was already bloated with alcohol. Of course that was also a time – the post-independence era, I guess – which allowed the oldest person in a group to buy a litre or two of the cheapest possible wine and then there would be a weekly ritual in one of the municipal parks. The more trees, the better. I imagine they told each other the truth about their parents, the confessions they squeezed out of them, or not, and later, as they got more and more drunk, talked about the colour of the swimsuits their mothers wore in the summer, the length of their fathers’ penises.

  ‘Ana, I know what you’ve had inside you from the very beginning. You accepted a compromise, but you never should have. I regret the day I came into your garden; I regret what we did under the tree; I regret our getting married...’

  I looked at the hand in which he held the milk carton. I was tempted to take it from him and throw it against the wall, but that would only give added legitimacy to his assertions. That I was too aggressive and couldn’t control myself, just like my mother. That for the sake of my work and, especially, of my lovers, I was prepared to go so far as to kill my own child and, by doing so, defy his father. You won’t let us get close, he said at the beginning, when things still hadn’t gone so far. Everything is in your hands, the house, the business, even our son; I’m just waiting for the day you kick me out. It’s not like that, I shook my head, when I still thought I could fix things. I spent whole days at my desk, drawing, redrawing, chasing my blue light, and that was all. But despite our initial willingness to get along – although I don’t know if it was really about trying to get along; maybe it was just that the child we had made in a moment of confused distraction suspected more than we did ourselves – our mutual antipathy went so far that my husband in the corduroy trousers – he was always wearing heavy materials, whether this was a genetic thing or his state of mind, I don’t know – started to believe I was bringing lovers into the house in his absence. He looked for signs, and because he didn’t find any, at least not tangible ones, he poked around in my work and then in our son and me. The night when he took me by force, I made up my mind to leave.

  ‘If you are thinking about that thing with the bathroom and the pool, that’s the least of it,’ I screamed at them both. ‘Glue, pills, a tin of shoe polish, all of that was going on in your absence, so, dear husband, don’t try to fuck with me. Instead of shaking with love for your son, you let yourself be shaken with electricity somewhere outside. Then for the three minutes you’re home, with us, you do your wonderful dad act. You don’t get it, do you? You never got it. The poor bastard’s afraid you’re gonna fucking run out on him. For good. When he was lying on those tracks, if there even were tracks, it was you he was shouting for, not me. I’m the one who’s here...’ I raised my arm in the air since I had lost my voice. I wanted to tell him that if he tried that child-killer accusation on me one more time I would shove the milk carton up his industrialist arse – but instead I collapsed on a chair. Mr Terry Pyjamas obviously lacked any counter-arguments and disappeared in the impenetrable elsewhere, a place this story can’t go, while my son sat down next to me, just like that long-ago day on the narrow balcony, and started stroking first my hair, then the back of my neck.

  I’ll say this, too: he did it in that way he had, which later, much later, when my eyes are closed in the hotel room with the curtains drawn shut, Ismael will see in the photograph. He will interpret his entire figure – I don’t know, the somewhat stooped shoulders, the freckles on his skin, the unnaturally twisted hand hanging beside his body – to mean that he’s a queerboy, but he wasn’t. At least not that I knew. I took it, took his hand, which in fact there was nothing wrong with, the hand in which, as he came dow
n the road, looking a little devious with his hair dishevelled, while I leaned against the car door, my hips thrust slightly forward as if I’d been yearning for something a long time, he was carrying ears of grain; he must have been thinking, if I bring her this, she will protect me from him, from Father; if I bring her anything at all, she will forget that I hurt her – I took it in my lap, stroked the back of it, and returned it to the body. In the light of my husband’s accusations, I found it just a little too heavy and too bitter.

  ‘Please don’t do this to me,’ I said, or maybe it was something else. In any case, I wanted my plea to touch him, to sound genuine, not like it came from a book. He nodded and then he too was lost somewhere among the branches and leaves of a municipal park.

  Chapter 4

  The ones I love are silent.

  Silent.

  (Miljana Cunta, ‘Medea’s Fifth Lamentation’, from By Half the Sky)

  We were walking down a road. As we had long before. I was carrying the yellow bag, and Ismael was wearing jeans that hung off his backside. All around, it seemed, emptiness was growing, although if someone pressed their ear to the divine gates, they would probably hear the noise of cars, the shouts of vendors selling bottled petrol, the deprecating remarks of women – younger, older, but always, mainly, women – who were taunting me to my face. Don’t answer back, Ismael’s hand in mine cautioned me, a woman’s belly is sacred here. Everything below it is taboo; as for everything that floats above it – breasts, nipples, collarbone, neck, and so on – nobody pays any attention. I sighed from the heat. What I really wanted to say was, I don’t know how long I can take it. Not just being in the sun, without water, but being here, in this landscape, where everybody has the right to tell you you shouldn’t be walking shoulder to shoulder with your decades-younger lover.

  A few days earlier some street children called me Blondie. ‘Blondie, donnes-moi l’argent!’ The same children who hooked up the electricity in my house, although now they were in a different part of the city. The laws of gravity, or maybe the laws of the food chain. Since I wasn’t giving them food often enough, leftovers, for example, especially not after Ismael slapped one of them across the face, they moved on to somewhere else. But when we ran into each other, ten kids versus one of me, they showed me their willies. In the semi-darkness you couldn’t really see if they were little, big, hairy or still bare, but it was their willies. The scene upset me so much I collapsed against a tree and buried my face in my hands. Some adults, mostly absent adults who nevertheless showed up now and then, must have explained to them that what they saw on that burning rug in the rented house was not good. Not good at all. And Ismael had predicted even then what would happen. This is probably why, walking along the road, he now squeezed my hand more tightly and, a few metres later, pointed toward an open umbrella beneath which a dark-skinned girl was mechanically opening and shutting a freezer.

  ‘If you are thirsty, we can have a Coca-Cola.’ Which I will have to pay for, I almost snapped back, but the one with his ear to the divine gates intercepted me. He had just opened them and all the noise was spilling out. Charging toward me, a car blasted its horn full strength.

  ‘My father called me to say he had his heart operated on,’ I said when we finally sat down on the bench. Then I bowed my head and waited. The waiting virgin, the waiting womb, the waiting Mother of God. Ismael, meanwhile, beneath the Coca-Cola umbrella, which cast a shadow on only half our bodies, clasped his hands. Even now I know that pose of his by heart: heels lifted off the ground, wrecked knees, penis always slightly tense, not to mention his torso, with arms that were merely an extension of his life force – even when his hands were clasped, even when the story they told was that I had got ahead of him when he had wanted to say something first. Back at the house, leaning on the cool wall right next to the slit-like window, he had been watching me with a strange melancholy. I thought he was going to ask, why me? or something similar, but later he simply suggested we go for a walk into town. Nothing special, just to stretch our legs, he said.

  Right behind the house, more precisely, behind a car, we came upon a dog that was dying. It was impossible to say what colour it was. Blood, sand, a lot of white, and those sad eyes. Is there any way you can pick it up? I pleaded. Can we take it to a vet? His answer was entirely predictable: we do not even take people to vets here. Please, I insisted, and because I insisted, he promised to do it on the way back. I mean, carry it to the terrace, where, if I wanted, I could take care of it. Now, he said, and looked somewhere past me, somewhere toward the road – the way Baba had on a previous occasion, when with the same half-squint he checked to see if the harmattan wind had let up, if the dust swirls had been carried to another part of the city – now he would like to go for a walk. I knew he wanted to ask me something, wanted me somewhere else. I turned my back on the departing dog and kicked at the sand. Then we walked the rest of the way in silence.

  All the way to that umbrella with the red design. All the way to that sweet, too sweet liquid, which we poured into our burning bodies. All the way to that ‘Will you marry me?’ I put the now half-empty bottle the dark-skinned girl had brought – when she opened the cap I could still feel the chill of the freezer on her hands and thought that the contrast was more than obvious – down on the table and, instead of relaxing, instead of the sip relaxing me, I contracted.

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? My father is ill.’

  ‘And I asked you if you would marry me.’

  ‘For a visa?’ I don’t know where I found such composure, such cutting words, but the best was yet to come. The promise of the future, as the one with his ear pressed to the divine gates might have said.

  ‘No, not at all for a visa. I thought...’

  I held on to the bench and gently rocked my body, as if trying to decide whether to say anything or not, as if I knew exactly what spoken words would bring and what silence would bring, but the balance in me was already disrupted, so all I could do was get my tongue moving. ‘You had this idea I’d be your ticket to Europe, but I am not from Paris, Ismael. I’m from a fucked-up town where people will judge you even more than they judge me here. Besides, I don’t know if I have strength enough to take your hand in the middle of the street and say what you said earlier. Let them watch – that’s what you said, isn’t it, or am I wrong?’

  Today I know that I wanted him to repeat those words. They were the biggest adventure in my life; they were the fulfilment of everything I secretly desired, no matter how much I might consider myself a freethinker. And if I really think about it, I was never truly able to fight this. I knew that from the very first day I had the smell of my son in my nostrils. The smell of milk, sharp, biting, but still pleasant. I’m not saying desire is necessarily contingent on marriage, on commitment to a man you don’t feel at all close to, but in my day and in my town such things seemed linked.

  ‘If you don’t want to, you don’t have to,’ Ismael said and pushed himself off the bench with all his strength.

  ‘At my age I really don’t.’ I was angry, not so much at him as at my situation. I had missed out on twenty, twenty-five years of my life. Back then, time would have been on my side, but now there was something tacky, something cheap about it all. I give him Coca-Cola and a roof over his head; he gives me a visa and a long willy. I didn’t tell him about the street kids; there were a lot of other things, too, I didn’t tell him, and that’s why now we were so far apart. When he pushed himself off the bench, he didn’t stand there a moment or try in some other way to buy time; he just started walking. Away from me. His body didn’t make any noise, nothing; all around there was only emptiness. I stared at his back as it moved away, for a minute, two minutes, trying to decide between the option of remaining on this bench under this umbrella and losing him forever and, the second option, that I suddenly stand up, toss a few coins on the table, leave the dark-skinned girl behind looking frightened, run after his vanishing
torso, shattered knees, slightly tense penis and, when at some point I realize I will never again attain all that, remove my low-heeled sandals and, after a pause to catch my breath, run on again. The younger girls, no longer deprecating me for taking their lover from them, send me smiles while, from the corner of my eye, I see the old women shaking their heads.

  I will never forget this scene – that scene by the tree, when I collapsed, my face in my hands, maybe, but this one, never. Ismael, because of an overhasty, but all the same negative, answer, was pretending that I didn’t exist, that I wasn’t wheezing behind his back. He was walking too fast on purpose, following the flow of his blood, until he suddenly hopped on a tro tro and disappeared in its sheet-metal body. Not unlike the way the Coca-Cola went into us.

  As the van receded into the distance – just as Ismael’s back had receded before, the only difference being that now I was holding my sandals in my hands and there was almost zero possibility of ever again hearing that sweet, that sweetest, question from my lover – I wondered about the colour of the rotting dog. I would limp my way back to the car it was lying behind and pick it up with my own hands. It couldn’t be far away; we hadn’t gone such a great distance, after all; if we had only gone a little further, maybe none of this would have happened, and if nobody had cut off the dog’s head, if only from empathetic malice, it must still be gazing at the world. Then I bent over carefully, in a kind of arc, whispered those words in connection with father’s operation, and in the slowest of motions brought the sandal strap to the other side.