Love Enough

by Dionne Brand

  There had been three revolutionaries: Isador, Eliazar and Everado. Dangerous as they all seemed, only Isador had looked her completely and freshly in the eyes. This she’d always taken as a sign of his honesty, even though she came to learn and despise his sloppiness later. The women who took Everado home ended up being beaten. Some had mused at the time that Everado had been brutalised so much that he thought it was common manners to do the same, but June thought this kind of justification was bullshit. Eliazar had a wife in Germany and perhaps that might have been the more economical choice to make given that any encounter would definitely be brief, but Isador had had the clearer eyes.

  Isador was placated by June’s explanation and June invited him to lunch to shore up the notion that she was not being harsh and inhospitable or ungrateful of his gesture. Lunch could only be a half hour, she said quickly, forestalling the possibility of a tedious time. Half an hour took two hours all together as Isador went through photographs of his family and his life. June was genuinely interested, marvelling at the great change in him. In the end it was as if she had never known him.

  Sometimes people are so utterly different from one year to the next. If June had seen this Isador years ago, she would have fled also, admittedly. Still she would have been more sympathetic maybe. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps it is not so complicated, seeing that human beings themselves are not complicated, just their ability to discern is complicated by all the signals they have to receive and send. Some prehistoric June was always in the process of calculating light, and flight, the sensory information necessary for surviving. And so easily one sensor or one feeler can be off. And June’s sensors were invariably off a degree or two. So back then she only received a certain signal from Isador, the way one receives, through light, the colour yellow, but not its ascending colour orange or the descending colour green. That is, she had seen him from a particular angle, as if she were standing at the angle of thirty-seven degrees and Isador at forty-five. She saw his flat underside but not he himself. Isador was in a similar position yet of course different. So he would return years later with a small bunch of white flowers and a placid face. And June at thirty-seven degrees still, would gesture to the shabby office and decline. But perhaps if they had seen each other from all angles none of this would have happened, not even their first meeting. We do what we can with what we have at the time, even when we believe we are trying to break the angles.

  Beatriz would never show up with flowers, June thought. Beatriz was serrated, another geometry. “Olvidate que me conocias,” she’d told June. That could not be mistaken for anything but what it was. Forget you knew me. Perfect. Though June felt slightly imperfect at the time, slightly miffed that she wasn’t the one telling Beatriz this. Of course that was ego—but perhaps it was love too. Because, after all, isn’t love absence? Like the absence of a limb makes you notice where it was and what it did. Beatriz had been very obtuse and suspicious. And there were reflexes to her that June did not want to travel. The nights Beatriz didn’t wake up from sleep violently at her throat, she had insomnia and lay there smoking beside June. She was the type of woman you should ensure leaves you, rather than the other way around. That way she would not hunt you down.

  EIGHT

  Some young men your age are making jihad, look at you. Nothing. Gangster, what is that? No faith, no nothing. I wish you would wear a vest with bombs rather than being a thug. You waste my life and you are a shame in the face of the prophet. I waste my life here for you.

  “You want me to make jihad? Eh, Dad? You making jihad doing taxi?”

  To tell the truth this is a city built for winters. In the summers Toronto sits disconsolate, humid in its thick pink fibreglass insulation. This is what the father, Da’uud, thinks and he thinks this is how his children have become, built for winters, thick and with a rough, abrasive inside. They are dull against his words, his barbs. He is not even a religious man. At times he is harsh with them, he says things he doesn’t mean. He cannot make that Bedri do anything. He has invoked the worst curses against this winter boy, ciyaal baraf, this boy who grew way beyond the height of the doorway and the width of Da’uud’s hand.

  “In this city you have to keep your belongings with you,” Da’uud tells this to a woman in his taxi. He tells her everything about the boy and everything about himself; how he was an economist, how he trained in Switzerland in 1978. How many languages he speaks, Italian, English, Arabic, French, Somali. How he went back home and how in 1994 he fled. The whole country fell apart under the men who knew everything. The military men, the religious men. The hard men. “You’ve heard this story?” he asks her. “Before you know it, you’re trapped. Five languages, Miss. Five.”

  She is looking out the window along the lakeshore. “No, that’s terrible,” she says. Why do men force their lives on me, she thinks.

  “Yes, terrible,” he says. “So I tell him all this. He doesn’t care. He can’t understand.”

  “Hmm,” she says.

  Da’uud picked her up on Eastern Avenue and he’s driving her along the lake as it wanders in and out from view. “So where are you going, Miss?”

  “Nowhere, really,” she says. She’s vague. But the man she is meeting has told her she is beautiful.

  “No, Miss, I mean the address. Where you call the taxi for to go.” He drives past the island airport with this red-haired passenger. Does it matter who he was before this? No, it doesn’t. The day he stepped into this cab it ceased to matter who he was. The day he set foot in this cab his life, so to speak, changed.

  “Sunnyside,” the passenger says.

  “Sunnyside,” he repeats. “Sunnyside,” he repeats again. The woman is brooding, so he is quiet. Every six months there’s an inspection on this car, he has to do this to keep the plates, then there’s the gas, then there’s the other driver, who is always crying about money as if Da’uud doesn’t have enough children of his own. Of course this is not what he would have done if there was any other way but there was no sense thinking about that. The heart is sore. Before you know it you’ve been driving a cab for ten years. The cab flies along the lake at the south of the city to Sunnyside.

  “Where in Sunnyside?” he says when they are near to Parkside Drive.

  “Just here,” the passenger says.

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here. The parking lot,” she says.

  He pulls into the parking lot. There are geese crossing the lot going toward the lake. Da’uud waits, the geese cross. He wishes he could come out of this cab and walk with the woman. She pays him, he sighs. It would change his life again to go walk with her. She waves to a man near a statue. Da’uud glimpses the man’s face. He doesn’t like it, it tears a sliver in his chest. He thinks, that man can kill someone. He has seen the faces of people who can kill people. The woman flutters toward the man. Da’uud leaves, saying to himself maybe he’s wrong, the things he knows are not useful. None of the things he knows has helped him to recover Bedri as a son, an obedient son whose life would redeem the choices a father makes.

  The lake oscillates like green-blue wet glass. What is in that lake, the woman leaving the taxi wonders. She wonders this the second after she sees the man’s face. After the taxi pulls out she walks towards him. She’s dyed her hair red for this meeting and she hopes he likes it. She’s met him here before. He always seems furious at seeing her even though he’s called her and begged her to come. Once she sees him she always, for an instant, regrets coming. But now she sees the lake and understands her attraction to him. She thinks, there is something turbulent there but she can’t see beneath the surface. Like looking in a mirror.

  The geese go about their daily life.

  The woman and the man walk toward each other expectantly, and then they turn together along the boardwalk toward the Humber bridge. All that they each had rushed to this appointment to say has evaporated. It has become inaudible or unspeakable. It walks between them, a slim column of molten air. They cannot reach through it to
hold hands or embrace, its particles are prickled like small spinning blades. She has nothing to say to the man and the man has nothing to say to her. What is in that lake, the woman wonders again. She wishes she could see through its billowy green. A bird, red under the wings, flies across their path and the woman says, “Look!” She wants their meeting to be full of wonder so again she says, “Look!” She wants him to see the red underwings as an omen. But he ignores her. He doesn’t want to see anything beautiful. She tries to touch his arm, the spinning blades sting her and she withdraws, then she turns again, gripping his arm this time so that he stops, turns toward her grimacing, feeling the blades cut his wrists and his forearm muscle, feeling himself a casualty of an event, though of what event he doesn’t know.

  He cannot fathom why he brought her here, why he wants to hurt her, why he wants to hurt himself, to crush something in himself. It is not love that brought him here, it is possession. It is not love that brought her here either, it is possession. It is so private, so sacred, so overwhelming, this possession, and it is malignant. Possession covers their heads, it is a tight band, a cupola of airless air. A covering so complete there is no world outside. Except she sees the billowing lake and she wants to dip her head into it, she sees a sign in the black bird with red underwings and she tries to show him. While the man is thinking that if he can free his forearm or if he can absorb the pain he can surface. Otherwise he will pull her down with him, and he doesn’t intend to go alone—he knows he is selfish but he doesn’t care. Why should he go alone? Why should he have to take all this hatred with him and leave her in the beautiful world? Then she will live without him and forget him and who is she to have the world while he loves her, and while he is gone.

  Months ago he had spotted her in a bar, no, it was outside a bar in the Distillery District. Despite its condo reincarnation, the old Gooderham and Worts factory lay its 19th-century shadow on their meeting. He was smoking, she was smoking, though it was freezing outside. He wasn’t lonely that he can remember. He was sad, but he is always sad. The kind who has a primeval sadness, before he was born he was sad. No, he doesn’t know why he is sad. When she gave him a light he wanted to speak Dutch to her but he didn’t actually know Dutch. His mother knew Dutch, his father knew Dutch, but he didn’t, he only knew English, so he started off wrong with her. He said, “Hey,” and that was the beginning of misunderstanding. He couldn’t get the right language out of himself, he only had feeling to go on and feeling is all primitive. That night he told her he’d been a peacekeeper, first in Bosnia and then in Haiti and he showed her how to subdue someone. He grabbed her arm and twisted it and then he let her go and laughed. She stayed talking to him after because she was afraid to walk away. And because he said she looked like Hilary Swank, and then he said, “Hit me in the face. See if you can do it.” And she did.

  People can’t handle the senses the way animals do. Animals eat, drink, sleep, fuck at a certain time. They don’t kill if they don’t have to kill for food. People have no borders, everything is mixed up, they’re lawless. Both of them were lawless. And it had brought them to the lake. He said she was beautiful and she took his statement as a command and did anything he asked. She had no centre except that word. She had been hanging from that word ever since she was a child. It meant giving other people pleasure, saying “yes” and never “no.”

  The woman loves being loved, more than she loves. That the man loves her is more compelling than whether she loves him. But sometimes, as now, she is overwhelmed by this love and breaks off to the lake or to the red underwings of a black bird. The blades cutting into him are spinning deep. He pulls his arm away and is about to hit her. Then the chamber he is enclosed in opens a fraction and he hears “butterflies.”

  “What?” he screams at the woman.

  “Nothing,” she breathes. She ducks her head and crouches down. He feels someone run up to him. She sees two women run by briskly in an argument. His arm arrests mid-stroke, he brings it down on his head and walks off. He’s sure he heard her say “butterflies.” What butterflies? The woman is still in a crouch on the boardwalk. She’s going to stay there until he’s gone. Then she will find the taxi man if he’s still there and she’ll go home.

  That is what Da’uud, the taxi driver, saw, the possibility of violence in the man. He’s seen this possibility in people all over the world. Beginning in Mogadishu during Siad Barre’s time and after he fell. It was there. The lethal tensions in the city. It was no longer important that he was an economist: the economy had tanked and now faith was the engine. He saw the signs: he saw the disrespect from ordinary people, and that it was more important to pray than to think. He had lived his life until then on the falsity of the idea that prayer was all that was necessary, yet he knew how powerful that idea was: it made people irrational and murderous. But then the facts of his profession glared at him: it too was irrational, though disguised as rationality; it too was murderous. How many eventual deaths had he relegated to one side of a ledger, calling this act “austerity”? The kind of murder that was gradual. Not the sweeping murder of the famine or the war. But at least, at least, he thought, his kind of murder was accidental. All murder was bloody but when people murdered for faith it was elemental; it was crude and bloody. He wasn’t capable of that, others were capable. The brother of his wife had wrapped himself in robes, joined the faith courts and become capable of anything. Da’uud had thought that bailing out of Mogadishu with his wife and daughter would be enough. But it wasn’t. Everywhere the violence had assailed him. When they arrived in Addis Ababa and later in Rome, it was there too—this same violence of faith—in people. He toured a church in Rome. It was full of ferocity and punishment. All he saw there was more blood. It surfaced again in the airport in Sweden in the simple look of a border guard, the interrogation room, and as much as he tried to ignore it, the violence pursued him over months in Oslo as he searched for work and a place to live. It made a dull sound like a weapon, a cleaver, on a human back.

  This is why he is talkative in his taxi. He watches the road and he talks as much as he can. He doesn’t want to see that violence in people. He talks even faster when he glances in his rear-view and sees someone like the red-haired woman in the back seat. He wishes he had told the woman he dropped off at Sunnyside to be careful, but nobody listens to him. Not his wife, not his daughter, not his son, nobody. Well, perhaps his wife, Amal. She listens. She left Mogadishu with him even though her brother was against it. If not for her the brother would have killed him. And look now, that same brother has sent his son to Rome for his education. So much faith, so little faith. After they had made such a mess of Mogadishu, a mess. He could have told that woman, he could have told her, but who listens to a cab driver; who listens to a man from another world.

  The lake is green this early evening, Da’uud notices. He began noticing the lake after three years in the city. Before that, life was like a hand over his face. When he discovered the lake he tried to get all the fares along the lakeshore. He likes this end of town, the south. It has definition, it has nature. If he is to drive a taxi, to spend his life driving a taxi, he’d rather drive it here along the expanse of the lake’s shore, from Cherry Street in the east to the Humber River in the west. You don’t see nature much in this city, not from a cab. Unless nature includes people. But he tries not to get involved in the passengers’ lives, he tries not to feel their anxieties. Insha’Allah. He’s got anxieties of his own, and that kind of nature he can do without. The day driver loves people, or so Khalid says. Khalid is always talking about how good people are, how funny, how crazy kind they are. Maybe, Da’uud thinks, maybe day people are that way but not evening and night people. Maybe the day driver gets more sleep so he has a better perspective on people, a different perspective. Da’uud doesn’t get enough sleep, but that makes him keener, he thinks, more alert to people. He only sees evening and night people and while people can be pleasant enough in the daytime, at night they run amok.

  Da’
uud would rather be in an office with numbers and papers. He does not want to embarrass himself, he does not want to embarrass his family but … and this “but” always sits on his chest. He has a good life here, there is nothing wrong with working. Poverty is slavery, and one cannot count on riches. There was that “but” again. You live, you live. You get married, you have children, you make a family. Nobody says how, just that you have to do it. Which is what he told Bedri. You live, these things you do. He even sent Bedri to Somaliland, where it was calmer. To see how life may truly be lived. Because despite everything, there you meet your obligations and you live a good life. It was over for him but not for Bedri.

  Five airports from here to Somaliland. Dau’ud told Bedri, you will pass through five airports. Each one a passageway to how life is supposed to be lived. In the first airport, Pearson, you get rid of all the things you are living. You remember but you can forget it because you must leave. You are sad, you think you don’t want to go, because of the people you leave behind. You are anxious. You want to hold on. The left side of your chest is raw with this, maybe. Yet you are not so sad because you are a little excited for the future. You escape into that fact. You must do this, you must. You are being made to leave. In the airplane you already feel a little far away from yourself. You are only yourself because you know that you are yourself. In the second airport, you are a small book with a coat of arms at the wicket before a guard. You are a photograph and a hand under a glass window. He looks at you. He does not recognise you—not the you you know, nor the you that you are leaving behind. He, the guard, is looking at the new you he makes with his stamp. You see your self in his eyes now. After you pass him you are even less the self you know you are. In this second airport—it could be Frankfurt or London; it might be Paris—you get rid of the other half of what you were living. After all, you are only a passenger, you have the portable body of a passenger: it only holds what it can carry. In the third airport, Abu Dhabi or Dubai, you remember nothing. Falling asleep, waking up on a bench, listening for your flight, you are suddenly blissful. You feel free. All the things you were worried about in the first airport, the friends you left, the events, the work undone, all this is irrelevant. They have gone away. You are in the middle of time. You can do nothing about old friends, they don’t matter. The thought occurs to you in this airport that all the important happenings you had planned, all the anxieties you experienced living in your life before the first airport, it’s good that all this does not exist. You need no longer exist in that life. It is going on, without you. You get some water now, you eat something, you hear your flight called. In the fourth airport at Addis, your eyes are open, your ears are open; you smell the world. You can change your clothes, free your legs, you can melt into a new life. You take out a phone from your pocket, you do not recognise it. It is your old phone with numbers from your life before. Is there someone you would call there? No. So you throw the phone away and you join the new ways of the people entering this life: how easy it is to forget, you say to yourself. You laugh. Hargeisa is the fifth airport. It is raining when you arrive there. There’s an earthy smell in the air, the smell of cool rain on the hot ground. The rain is not heavy. You breathe in the open world before you. Your bag of clothing and all that you thought you needed seem weighty. You’re tempted to leave the bag but you are vaguely curious to see what the other person who was you some hours, perhaps a day and a half ago, has in that bag. You’re sure you have no use for anything in there except perhaps a toothbrush and that you can buy. Here is your new life. You know no one and no one knows you. You will make no mistakes here and all past mistakes are erased. You begin.