by Alex Miller
‘It will grow again,’ Sabiha said lightly, setting down the knives and forks again on the red checked cloths. ‘Just get it cut if you want to. I would.’
‘Would you really?’ This wasn’t the answer Houria had been hoping for. She wanted enthusiasm from her niece. She said glumly, ‘Dom liked it long.’
Sabiha paused again and they stood looking at each other across the small dining room.
Sabiha wanted to say, Listen, Dom’s dead. Okay? So just get your hair cut if you want to. What’s the difference? She smiled and said nothing. She had never met Dom of course. And there was evidently a complication she did not understand. People were funny. She loved her aunt and didn’t want to say anything that might offend her.
Houria lifted her shoulders. ‘I just don’t know what to do!’
The very first evening Sabiha arrived in Paris, they were standing in the back room upstairs that Houria had prepared for her. It was a sweet little room, under the sloping roof, intimate, safe and homely. A bed with a flowered cover and a hard-backed chair beside the bed, an old black trunk from Dom’s seafaring days pushed up under the slope of the roof to keep her clothes in. A pot of some lovely fragrant spice mixture on the deep windowsill, like a blessing on the air. Sabiha felt she was wanted. Houria apologised for the lack of a mirror.
‘I’ll get you a mirror, darling, as soon as I have a minute.’ She asked her then if there was something special she wanted to do in Paris.
Sabiha said, ‘I’ve imagined going up the Eiffel Tower and seeing the whole of Paris laid out below me.’
Houria leaned and pointed through the singlepaned window above the bed. ‘See that red light? Way over to the north of us there?’ Sabiha bent to look and their heads touched. ‘That’s the light on the top of the Eiffel Tower.’ They leaned there together, looking out the narrow window into the glowing sky above the great city.
Sabiha said, ‘It’s so beautiful.’ And it was, for there is no more beautiful sight in the whole world than the rooftops of Paris at night.
‘We’ll go together,’ Houria said. ‘I’ve never done it. Dom wasn’t one for the sights.’ Houria kissed Sabiha’s cheek, then straightened and said, ‘I’ve changed my mind about selling the business and going home to El Djem. El Djem’s no longer my home.’ They looked at each other. ‘Yes. I was panicking when I wrote to your father. Dom’s death was such a shock. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was saying or thinking or anything.’ She took Sabiha’s hand and held it and led her downstairs and into the kitchen, where she set about making hot chocolate for them both. ‘The minute I stopped and faced the reality of going back to Tunisia, I knew this was my real home. Paris is where I’ll die.’
‘Don’t say that. You’re never going to die.’
Sabiha was secretly thrilled. She had already decided not to go home unless she was absolutely forced to.
‘This is where my memories are,’ Houria said, looking around the kitchen at the worn pots and pans and the crocks and piles of bowls and old brown pichets and wine bottles and all the paraphernalia she and Dom had gathered together over the years. ‘If I went back now, what I’d have would be just those old threadbare childhood memories. I’d be sitting with the old women being a widow, listening to them gossiping about lives and times I know nothing about. What could I say to them? If I went back now, I’d be more alone than I am here. I’d just be waiting to die. Well I’m not ready for that. Not yet.’
Sabiha said. ‘You’re still young, Aunty.’
Houria put her arms around Sabiha and drew her close. ‘You smell wonderful. I’m going to keep you.’
Sabiha went on laying the tables.
‘Get your hair cut this afternoon,’ she said definitely. She liked to see all the knives and forks and the jugs of water and the glasses sitting exactly in their correct places before the men started arriving for their midday meal. She looked around at her handiwork with pride, then back over at Houria.
‘I’ll come with you to the hairdressers and watch. I’ll hold your hand.’
Both women laughed.
Houria said, ‘What would I do without you?’
Chapter Four
Houria had a far subtler understanding of spices than Dom, which was why her cooking was of another order altogether than his had been. Her secret had been well kept all those years. Her light hidden under a bushel. A necessary modesty in a woman. Now she brought her secrets out and displayed them, and it wasn’t long before the immigrant working men of the district heard about Chez Dom and began to come to the café for their midday meal. With Houria cooking and Sabiha waiting on the tables, the men could speak their Tunisian dialect, and the spicy cooking smells in the café were the smells of home. For an hour in the middle of their working day the men might almost have been with their own wives and daughters. In Chez Dom it was possible to forget the smell of the slaughterhouse. The young men smiled shyly at Sabiha and were gracious in their manners. The older men followed her with their eyes and thought of their own daughters and were moved by the grace of this young woman from home.
Within a year of the death of Dom Pakos the customers at the café were exclusively North African workmen. There were a few among them who had also managed to start their own small businesses. Chez Dom became their meeting place. Some of them drank wine but many of them did not, so on the whole it was cheaper for Houria to run the café than it had been when all their customers had drunk a good many glasses of wine with their midday meal. As well as this, Houria expanded the business. Her sweet pastries were rapidly becoming famous. She sold them through her friend Sonja at the market and took orders from local shops and businesses. When she wasn’t busy preparing the lunch, Houria was shopping for supplies or cooking sweet pastries. The pastries were a profitable sideline and Sabiha was her willing apprentice in the enterprise. The two of them were always laughing and singing as they worked together in the kitchen of Chez Dom.
‘I will teach you everything,’ Houria told her. ‘For a woman to understand the art of spices is as important as it is for her to understand the arts of love. With these accomplishments she will never lose her man, even when she loses her youth and her looks. I promise you!’ Sabiha blushed and Houria laughed and kissed her. ‘One day your man will come into your life and you will know him at once. That is how it is. It was like that for Dom and me. It has always been the way of all true love.’
With short hair Houria looked more confident than she ever had before. It was her manner as much as anything. After she had her hair cut she became the dignified patronne of the ‘house’ and was no longer just Dom Pakos’s widow carrying on the business as best she could. Now she was her own woman. The position grew on her. She adopted it. She became someone. Something in Houria was completed by the death of her husband. Something of herself was released. It took time for her to acknowledge this to herself. But it was true. After Dom’s death she began to have ideas and to put her ideas into practice. And her ideas worked. She was successful. She had not expected any of this and was excited by her success.
Now that the heavy cowpat was gone, Houria’s smile was broader and more generous, and she walked with that lighter step she had envied in other women, catching herself being more happy than she had ever been when her beloved Dom was alive, and needing to remind herself from time to time that her man’s death must be memorialised with dignity and gratitude in her daily life. Dom had not left nothing behind him, after all. It was on the modest foundation of what he had left behind him that she and Sabiha had built their new business. It was different. Life was different without him. But Dom was still around. At night he was with her. When she needed him, he found her. Dom still had his place in her life. But gradually, day by day, Dom’s influence was becoming subordinate to her realities and she spoke of him less and less often to Sabiha. She never visited his grave. That was not how she wished to remember him.
The workmen who came to eat at the café, Tunisian men who had once be
en her own people in the distant past, knew nothing of Dom, but she knew. She still slept in their bed at night, didn’t she? And she still talked to him, and made love with him, giving him pleasure and taking her pleasure with him. And while Sabiha slept and dreamed her dreams in the back room with its single-pane window looking out onto the laneway, a distant glimpse of the light winking on the top of a building behind the Montparnasse railway station—which had nothing at all to do with the Eiffel Tower—Houria was still Dom’s princess in the arts of love.
They were happy, these two women. As happy as they could be. It was true, there were times when Houria missed Dom with a sudden chill gust of fear and a sense of helpless loss, as if he called to her from the void. And there were moments when she felt guilty about his death, as if she had lost him through her own neglect. But on the whole she was content that he was gone and she would not have wished him back if she had been given the chance to make such a wish. She had her new life. Her own expanding life. And she had her brother’s beautiful daughter by her side.
‘You are the daughter I never had,’ she told Sabiha.
‘Are you terribly lonely, Aunty?’ Sabiha asked her. The two of them were cuddled up on the green couch in the little sitting room under the stairs, both of them tired from their long day, the blue and yellow flames of the gas fire murmuring comfortingly.
‘I’ve got you,’ Houria said, kissing Sabiha’s cheek. ‘How could I be lonely?’ She loved the soft feel of Sabiha’s cheeks against her lips. ‘You would have loved my Dom, and he would have loved you. You would have been his daughter too.’
‘Did you never want a child?’ Sabiha asked her shyly. She was curious about Houria’s childlessness, for secretly Sabiha believed herself destined to be a mother and knew she would never be whole as a woman until she held her own child to her breasts. It was not a man she dreamed of, but a child. She could not imagine a contentment such as Houria’s without a child. Sabiha’s secret child was a comfort to her, it was a warmth, a presence; deep within her, it waited patiently for the moment of its birth. She was sure of it. The child had been there since she was a little girl. The child was herself, this inner, secret child of hers. She had spoken of it to no one, not even to her sister Zahira. One day she would have the child with her, and on that day she would become a woman.
‘No, darling. Dom and I were enough for each other. We were both wanderers in this world until the day we met. And from that day we were home for each other.’ She stroked Sabiha’s hair, André's dog barking at the cat in the back lane, the fire hissing and burping. ‘But you will have children,’ Houria said. ‘And you will love them. And they will love you.’ Sabiha snuggled closer and closed her eyes. She loved her aunt’s smell, her touch, her motherly intimacy; Houria’s smell was so very different to her mother’s. It was not a brood of children she wanted but was just one child. Her child. There was only one. She knew it without knowing how she knew it.
When Sabiha asked Houria why she and her own mother had originally left Tunisia and come to France Houria said, ‘Your grandmother needed medical treatment. It wasn’t available in Tunisia at that time.’ She was silent then. ‘That was her official reason for going. My mother’s life was hard. She was not like your other grandmother. My mother was a restless woman. She was always looking for something she never found. She was never happy. She couldn’t find the happiness she was looking for. It’s like that for some people. That’s all there is to it. It’s not a great mystery. Some people are discontented and some people are not.’
As a child Sabiha had been close to her grandmother on her mother’s side, but her grandmother on her father’s side, Houria’s mother, had never been spoken of in the family. No one had ever said ‘your grandmother’ to her before this and meant her other grandmother. She would have liked to know more, but felt that Houria did not wish to talk about her childhood alone in Paris with her discontented mother. She said to Houria, ‘Do you think I’m discontented?’
Houria laughed. ‘You? No, darling. You’re as contented as a kitten. Life suits you. You’re like me.’
But although she loved her aunt Houria, Sabiha knew in her heart she was not like her. She feared to be discontented. How did you keep such feelings from your mind if they came to you?
Sabiha never spoke of going home to El Djem. She wrote a letter to her mother every week, giving her mother the news in detail, and reassuring her that she was happy and in good health and would come home for a holiday soon. Sabiha knew her father understood that she was never coming home. Perhaps not even for a holiday. How was she to find the time? Her life was going on without them. After little more than a year in Paris she was already not the person she had been when she was living at home in El Djem. She knew her father accepted this. Her father didn’t need reassuring. He didn’t need explanations from her. He knew that people go away and never return. His own mother had done so. And she herself was now moving away from her past at such a speed she could sometimes scarcely recall her old life. She didn’t have the time to think about it. She was going to the market on her own these days, buying the spices Houria required, being initiated by Houria into the mysteries of mixing spices and many other things. She loved her new life with her aunt Houria in Paris. It was too exciting to think of home with regret. Travelling alone on the métro, being a young woman walking along the streets of Paris with all the other people, Houria trusting her and making sure she always had money in her purse. This was her life now. It was a real life. Not the waiting life she had lived at home.
She lay in her bed at night under the sloping roof, looking at the distant light winking in the sky, and she repeated the astonishing claim to herself again and again: ‘I am a young woman living in Paris with my aunt.’ It was a fact. A magical fact. There were a hundred, no, there were a thousand things she was going to do as soon as she had the free time. She was determined to see all the great sights of Paris and to miss nothing. She wanted to know everything.
It is true that there were also times when she would have liked to sit with her father under the pomegranate tree in the courtyard at evening and tell him everything she had seen, and to share with him some of the secret misgivings that stole into her heart at times. She never wrote to him, but sent him and Zahira her news through her regular letters to her mother. She was too close to her father to write to him. And he did not write to her either. If they were to write to each other they would write things that could not be shared with her mother and sister. They knew, she and her father. That was all they needed from each other. To know. A time would come when they would need more than this knowing from each other. Then they would ask. Then each would give to the other what was asked.
Chapter Five
It was a rainy summer afternoon, a year and a half since Sabiha had come to live with her aunt. The café was quiet, the dining room empty. The men had finished their midday meal and gone back to work an hour ago. The door to the street was open, a drift of rain darkening the boards, the door creaking in the breeze. Houria and Sabiha were in the kitchen baking pastries and singing along to the music on the radio. The breeze died, suddenly, and the rain came on heavier. People in the street were ducking and hurrying now, a young couple laughing and grabbing at each other as they ran past the window.
Houria stopped singing and said over her shoulder, ‘Someone came in.’
Sabiha looked out through the bead curtain. A stranger was sitting at the table under the window to the right of the door, the table where she and Houria regularly ate their own midday meal. The window looked directly onto rue des Esclaves. The stranger appeared settled and had evidently been sitting there for a minute or two already. He was holding a book open on the table in front of him, his fingers spread across the pages, but he wasn’t reading. He was looking out at the squall and the people hurrying to get to shelter, some with umbrellas, others with their coats over their heads. He had taken his wet jacket off and hung it over the back of the chair opposite him. The jacket was
a dark brown woollen weave with lighter tan leather patches on the elbows. Sabiha noticed that the stitching on the patch of the right sleeve had come adrift. It was the first thing she really noticed about him, and she would always remember it. He looked as if he was expecting someone to join him. He had fair hair and no moustache and was wearing blue jeans and a white open-necked shirt. On his feet he had brown elastic-sided boots. One boot crossed over the other under his chair.
The two women watched the man. His wet hair straggled over his shirt collar. He was tall. In his late twenties. His shoulders rounded with the way he was sitting forward over the table. He looked away from the street then and sat back and eased his shoulders, gazing about, examining the empty dining room, his eyes sliding over the bead curtain, his expression serious, self-contained, confident, as if he felt no unease at finding himself in a strange place. He reached across the table to his jacket and took a pair of glasses from the inside pocket, put them on and began to read his book.
Houria and Sabiha looked at each other.
Houria said, ‘You’d better go and see what he wants.’
Sabiha pushed at a tray of biscuits. The tray was hot and she whipped her hand away and sucked her finger. She felt suddenly inarticulate.
‘Go on!’ Houria urged her gently, grinning.
Sabiha looked out through the curtain again. ‘We’re closed,’ she said. ‘He’ll leave in a minute.’
‘Chez Dom has never turned away a hungry traveller.’ Houria said this as if it was a principle enshrined in the traditions of the café since the founding days of her beloved Dom Pakos. ‘Go on!’ She gave Sabiha a shove with her elbow. ‘He’s not going to bite you.’
