by Alex Miller
The red checked curtains that Dom’s wife Houria had strung across the lower half of the café's window were always drawn aside, allowing the daylight to enter the modest dining room and permitting the patrons to see who was coming and going on the street outside. Inside, a plain varnished timber bar stood across from the front door, and here Houria dealt with the bread and the wine and the coffee. The wooden trims around the window and door were painted green, and the walls were a calm faded old pink, rather like the underside of a freshly picked mushroom. Houria always had laundered red or green checked cloths spread over the six tables. And, depending on the time of year, there was usually a generous bunch of yellow daisies or russet chrysanthemums in a green ceramic jug at the end of the bar nearest the door. The only sign advertising the café was painted in a less than professional hand in red letters across the window above the door. At the back of the dining room, opposite the door and to the right of the bar, a bead curtain led through to the kitchen, where Dom Pakos did his work. Chez Dom’s customers were from the immediate locality, many of them from the lower levels of management at the abattoirs. It was rare that a customer enjoying a midday meal in the little dining room did not know all the other diners. Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom.
The café had been established twenty years earlier by Dom Pakos and his Tunisian wife, during the winter of 1946, in those chaotic days immediately after the war, when everyone was scrambling to find their feet. Dom Pakos had been a merchant seaman before the war and a ship’s cook during the war and had found himself stranded in Paris when the peace was signed. It was meeting Houria, who was twenty-eight at the time, that decided Dom to give café life a try. He was always to claim afterwards, with a combination of surprise and pride, that it was Houria who had made sense of his life for him. They were both misfits the day they met, and each knew at once, with a fierce instinct, that they would cleave to the other for life. Neither ever required children from their union to make it complete. Dom and Houria completed each other.
Dom thought he was a great cook, but he was not even a middling to good one. The café thrived not on Dom’s cooking but because he was an energetic and cheerful man who enjoyed the company of his customers. For Dom Pakos all people were pretty much equal; the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, the old and the young, the infirm and the agile, they were all much of a muchness to Dom. He had sailed to the wildest ports of the world and seen everything of the human parade on offer. If you were even half-human, you felt Dom loved you. And if you were a stray dog or cat, he fed you scraps at the back door of his kitchen, where the defile of the cobbled laneway to this day arrives at its abrupt destination. Dom’s tolerance had its limits, to be sure, but generally he was open to the world and indiscriminate in his affections. He was not a religious man, but neither was he averse to the company of those who were. Dom’s gift was the gift of happiness. He had it from his mother. His ease and generosity of manner could strike a smile from the sourest soul.
It was a pity he died the way he did. Less than two minutes elapsed between Dom’s collapse and Houria’s return to the kitchen from the dining room. She pushed in through the bead curtain, some comment or other ready on her lips, expecting to find the bowls filled and ready for her to carry out to the waiting diners. She saw at once that Dom Pakos was dead. But Houria did not scream or react in any way as if she was witnessing something terrifying. She knelt on the old cracked tiles beside her husband and took his head gently in her hands. ‘Dom!’ she pleaded softly, as if she expected to wake him. She knew he was dead. Death is unmistakable. But she could not believe he was dead. It was the first time she had ever seen a grimace of discontent on her husband’s face, and it was this she remembered afterwards.
When the surgeon conducted a post-mortem on Dom’s corpse two days later at the hospital mortuary he found that an aneurism in the wall of Dom’s abdominal aorta had burst. ‘Dom scarcely suffered at all,’ the surgeon reassured Houria when she went to the hospital to receive his report. The surgeon was tall and had drooping, sad eyes, as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, and a small moustache beneath a large nose. He reminded Houria of the saviour of France’s dignity, Le Général himself. She felt safe with him, and half believed, even as she sat in his office next door to the mortuary, where Dom’s remains were lying, that the surgeon was going to tell her Dom was not dead after all.
‘So he is dead, then?’ she said, the tiny little hope she had kept alive until now winking and going out as she spoke it.
‘Oh yes, Madame Pakos, your husband has passed to the other side, we can have no doubt of that.’ The surgeon smiled and touched his small moustache, which had begun to remind her of Hitler’s moustache. ‘Your husband was a very fit man for his age, Madame Pakos.’ The surgeon said this with such an air of comforting surprise she thought for a flickering instant he was telling her good news. ‘You must have been taking very good care of him. When your man’s aorta burst he exsanguinated in a matter of seconds.’ The surgeon fell silent, deep in thought for a moment, then he suddenly went ‘Whoosh!', making the sound through his pursed lips and at the same time throwing out his hands towards Houria across his desk in a bursting motion.
Houria jumped.
The surgeon regarded her closely, then announced in a grave voice, ‘Once the gate was open, Madame Pakos, his big heart pumped his blood into his abdominal cavity at a terrifying rate as it struggled heroically to do its job. But to no avail.’ He paused and drew breath, then leaned towards Houria, conspiratorial in his intensity. ‘When the body’s Canal Grande bursts its banks, the more powerful the heart the more abrupt the decease of the man.’ He sat back. His expression indicated to Houria that something greatly to his satisfaction had just been expressed and she wondered if she should offer him some kind of congratulation. But the interview was over. The surgeon had other fish to fry.
Her interview with the surgeon signified for Houria the official end of twenty years of happiness with Dom Pakos. She was forty-seven and from now on she was to be alone. She thanked the surgeon and got up from her chair and went home to the café, which was very silent and very still. A lonely empty place without her Dom.
She sat on their bed in their room above the café and stared out the window at the upstairs windows of Arnoul Fort’s shop across the street. She had not taken off her coat and she still clutched her bag in her lap with both hands, as if she was expecting to be called at any minute to get up and go somewhere urgently. But the minutes went by and no one called. The voices of children playing in the street beneath her window, cars hooting their horns, and every now and then a voice raised in greeting or farewell, the tight, sharp smell of the abattoirs. This was her home. She would have liked to reach back into the antique past and have her own grieving voice joined in lamentation with the voices of the women of the tribe. But all that was lost to her long ago. After staring out the window for quite a long time, Houria suddenly remembered that Dom was never coming home again. She began to sob helplessly, the wrenching pain of his loss like an iron band around her chest.
When she at last stopped weeping, she got off the bed and went downstairs and hung her coat in the alcove and put her bag on the bench in the kitchen. She made a glass of sweet mint tea, clasping it in both hands close under her nose to comfort herself with its familiar fragrance. She could see Dom’s shadow through the bead curtain. He was standing by a table in the dining room looking out the window, gesturing with his cloth in his hand, talking to a customer. He was so real she could have reached out and touched him. ‘Dom!’ she whispered, the emptiness of despair in her now. ‘Do you remember, you promised you would always love me and would never leave me?’
She closed the café and put a notice on the door, and for several days she went about aimlessly, picking up a saucepan then putting it down again, going to the back door and looking along the lane, not knowing what to do with herself. She cried a good deal and was not able to settle to
anything. André's grey ghost of a dog, Tolstoy, a big old borzoi, came to the back door and pressed its head against her and gazed up at her with its great melancholy eyes. She caressed the head of the beautiful beast and it stood close and attentive while she told it of her sorrow, the faint sour animal smell of its damp pelt rising pleasantly to her nostrils.
One evening, when the children on the street had all gone home and the cars had ceased going by hooting their horns, she sat in the absorbed silence of the little sitting room they had made together under the stairs and she wrote a letter to her brother in El Djem. An unaccustomed longing for home and family had risen in her as the evening had come on, like the waters of a long-dry spring returning and bubbling to the surface.
Dearest Hakim, she wrote. My man is dead and now I am alone. I have decided to come home, but first I must put our affairs in order here and sell the business if I can find a buyer for it. The freehold is not ours but André, our landlord, is a good man and will give me time to do the best I can for myself.
She wrote some more about herself, then asked how everyone was at home, struggling all the while to form a clear picture in her mind of the place she had not seen since she left it with her mother as a girl of seventeen, thirty years earlier.
In El Djem a few days later Houria’s brother, Hakim, came home from his day’s work on the road gang. His wife took his jacket at the door and his two unmarried daughters, Sabiha and Zahira, stood beside her looking at him. Hakim’s moustache was whitened from the dust of the road. His wife handed him his reading glasses and the letter and he stood angling the envelope to the light in the doorway, examining the writing. Hakim opened the envelope by running the disfigured nail of his thumb under the flap and he took out the single sheet of paper and unfolded it. He read his sister’s letter aloud to them, reading slowly, pronouncing each word with care, lingering in a small silence at the end of each phrase. Hakim had lost his government job when he joined the Communist Party, but he had not lost his ideals or his self-respect. When he finished reading his sister’s letter he looked up at his wife and daughters. ‘Dom Pakos is dead,’ he said, surveying their faces. He had never met his sister’s husband. ‘My sister is coming home.’
Hakim washed, then went out into the courtyard and sat on the bench under the pomegranate tree and smoked a cigarette in the last of the sun, the ruined amphitheatre visible above the wall of the courtyard, its ancient stones golden in the evening light. His wife brought him a glass of mint tea and he thanked her. She withdrew into the house to prepare the evening meal and he sat in the quiet alone, sipping his tea with little slurping noises and taking an occasional drag on his cigarette. He had read the despair in his sister’s words and her pain had touched him. They had not seen each other for thirty years. He decided to send his youngest daughter, Sabiha, to Paris to keep Houria company and help her until Houria could sell her business and organise her move back to El Djem. He could not bear the thought of his sister grieving alone in the distant city of her exile. Even as this decision was forming in Hakim’s mind, he was thinking how patterns form in families, repeating themselves like patterns in the weave of a carpet, from one generation to the next. He was thinking of Houria leaving on the bus with his mother all those years ago, he and his father and two brothers standing by as the bus pulled away from the post office, his sister’s and his mother’s faces pressed to the window, their hands waving. He was not yet a man then and had never understood why his mother had gone away, but had accepted it.
Sabiha came out of the house. She was the favourite of his two daughters. She stepped across to him and took her aunt’s letter from the bench beside him where he had laid it. He watched her read it, seeing the eagerness in her. The Difficult One, he called her. Two daughters, and on this one destiny had placed its mark. Why this should be so, no one could know, but he had known from the day of her birth that she was not to be as his other daughter was. He and Sabiha understood each other in ways neither of them could explain. He knew Sabiha would manage Houria’s grief, and would even manage the whole of Paris, and the world, if she was called upon to do so. What is it, he asked himself, looking with love at his beautiful daughter reading the letter, that makes some people so different from others that they cannot share a common fortune with them?
Sabiha sat on the narrow bench beside her father and leaned her head against his shoulder. ‘Do you miss your sister?’ she asked him. She was dreaming of her aunt Houria in Paris. She longed to meet her aunt and to know Paris.
Chapter Three
Since Dom’s death Houria had been worrying about her hair. Dom had liked her to keep her hair long, so that she could uncoil it in front of the dressing-table mirror at night and brush it out while he lay in bed admiring her. ‘Long hair,’ he told her, reaching his arm around her as she climbed naked into the bed beside him, ‘is the true grace of a woman.’ They slept naked. Winter and summer. As long as Dom was alive there had never been a chance of even talking about getting her hair cut short. But Houria had been secretly envying women with short hair for some time.
While no one, and certainly not Houria herself, would have come straight out and said that Dom’s death was a blessing in disguise for Houria, his absence did nevertheless bring certain liberties into her days. There were even odd moments when she caught herself guiltily enjoying being without him, the thought teasing her that she was entering a new and interesting phase of her life. She had begun letting the grey grow out, but that was all, so far. It was a start. She was not standing still. She saw women of her own age, and even older, going about the streets with fashionably short grey hair and she envied them. It wasn’t so much that they looked smarter, though they did, as that they seemed to her to be freer and more confident. As if they were living in a world of their own choosing. Their own world, that’s what she envied these women. Something to do with a decision they had made. Their step was lighter, she noticed, than the step of older women like herself who still wore their hair long and had the grey disguised by the hairdresser every few weeks. Now that Dom was gone, she was impatient to join the short-haired women of Paris before it was too late to enjoy it. She was agonising now over whether Dom had been dead long enough yet for her to get her hair cut short without offering a slight to the dignity of his memory. If she were to suddenly appear on the street and in the café with short hair, mightn’t it seem to everyone that she was glad to be rid of him? Mightn’t it even seem like that to herself? This possibility was all that was holding her back.
She was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, holding the bead curtain aside and watching Sabiha lay the tables. Sabiha was wearing a pretty blue and white dress with a belted waist. Her long dark hair was tied back with a blue ribbon. When Sabiha straightened and turned around, Houria said, ‘How do you think I’d look with short hair, darling?’
Sabiha considered her aunt, holding the bunch of knives and forks and the cloth in her hands, seeing a woman nearing fifty, her thick coil of hair growing out at the roots into a strong iron grey. ‘Really short? Or just shorter?’ she asked. Houria had a broad, handsome face, her hair pinned in a double coil and sitting like a cowpat on top of her head. It looked very unnatural and heavy. And it made her aunt look like an old woman. Like a woman who had given up trying, or who was maybe trying too hard. When Houria had complained to her of getting old, Sabiha told her, ‘You don’t seem old to me. You seem really young for someone your age.’ Houria had laughed and hugged her.
‘No, really short,’ Houria said, reaching her hands up and pushing at the heavy cowpat with her fingers, dusting her hair with flour—for she was in the middle of making a batch of filo. ‘Down to an inch or two.’ She held up her hand, thumb and forefinger indicating the length of hair she was aiming for. ‘Two, maybe three at the most. What do you think? Tell me the truth.’ She was longing to get out from under her hair. If Sabiha approved, she would step into the hairdressers this afternoon and have it done. Sabiha herself had
beautiful hair, long and glossy and black as … well, very black. It would be a terrible pity if Sabiha were to cut her hair short. But that was not the point. Sabiha was twenty-one and would soon have to find herself a husband and start a family. At Sabiha’s age, long hair was as much a necessity of life for a woman as a moustache was for any half-decent sort of man. There was a time for everything.
Sabiha smiled. Her aunt stood before her in her enormous blue apron and those heavy black shoes she always wore. Houria was not a beautiful woman. In fact she was short and fat. She was a lovely woman. But she was not beautiful. Those vast breasts and her strong arms and sturdy legs could not be called beautiful. A good and capable woman she was, to be sure, and kind and generous. All those things. She was surprised now by her aunt’s vanity. Sabiha’s own mother was not vain. Or at least Sabiha had never noticed her mother being vain, not about her appearance at any rate. Her mother was delicate, thoughtful and intensely proud of her husband, but she was not vain. Sabiha tried to think of her mother with short hair but couldn’t imagine it. Houria was very different from her mother. Sabiha’s mother was beautiful. She was sad and beautiful and she had wept when Sabiha left on the bus from outside the post office. Her father had definitely not married his sister’s look-alike. It amused Sabiha to see this anxiety in Houria about her appearance. ‘Why don’t you just go and get it cut,’ she said. ‘If you don’t like it, you can let it grow again.’
Houria patted her hair. ‘Do you really think I should?’ She knew in her heart that to cut her hair short now would be a kind of divorce from Dom. She wanted a divorce from him, was that it? She wanted a divorce from their past. That was it. To hope for something good in her future, that was what she wanted now. To set out again. With his death, if she was not to begin living in the past, divorce from the old days with Dom was a necessity. It was very unexpected and she did not quite know what to make of herself for thinking in this way. Was it good or bad? She was not sure. But it excited her and she could not help secretly admiring herself for it. She understood there was a kind of courage in it.
