Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  Because her interest in love was democratic, now this kind and now that, each as worthy as the other with no difference between them, Ayeesha would not be a super, superstar. But because she was charming and determined, rise she did, respectably, reliably, to make her way in small-scale, medium-scale, and sometimes in successful films. She acquired a loyal, modest following of teenaged boys and grandpas. She wore pretty gowns with style and she could do her handsome face in any way at all: now a sweet girl, now a fury, now a wounded sis.

  After acting for some years, living ably on her own—in a third-floor flat not far from the first, the written-down, address—all but disavowed for shamelessness by the family that bore her but buoyed by the true affections of those who loved her on the screen, Ayeesha was transformed into a wife. The suitor? A sickly whiskered man far older than her grandpa. This fine, upstanding babu caught sight of her through cataracted eyes on television once while visiting a friend, and when the teenaged boys explained to him exactly who she was, the grandpa fell in love. Onscreen, especially with shadows taking hold of babu’s ailing eyes, Ayeesha glowed and glowed. And so he sent his nephew with a message to the studios, and later to her house, and later—not much later—Ayeesha caved right in.

  Ayeesha let this grandpa make a home for her because she thought young men were too foolish: the teacher, all hot dreams and talk, had never left the school; the dark-eyed, talented director who had also tried his hands already had a wife. The babu never spoke of her especially nice feet. He never mooned about her face. He simply said he’d like her near, please, in the night, to soften his old age. Ayeesha found some pleasure in his means. A house, with no more rent to pay! She also thought, Nearly blind, and old! A man who couldn’t see too well, and what’s more who was weak, would not, she thought, restrain her.

  Ayeesha’s husband did not, in fact, prevent his wife from acting on the screen. He thought, She’s an orphan, the film folk are her family. So Ayeesha kept on acting, and she also made some money. A good thing, this, since the babu was not extremely manly. He was very good at sleeping, for example, and at yawning, and at rubbing his soft belly with a frown, and at dragging one gaunt hand from jaw to cheek as though to bring the skin back to where it had been in his youth, then grunting and then napping once again, almost unaware. Nor was he a husband, understand, who can pet, and kiss, and stroke. He did his duty only once, with everything he had, then didn’t anymore. But nine months after that one time, thank God, Ayeesha lay right down and set her pretty teeth and pushed and pushed and out popped and soon began to bellow a real live tiny child. Lucky man, Ayeesha made a boy. This is Khaled, now, remember. Ayeesha, apart from feedings and some wipings, didn’t pay the baby too much motherly attention. But when she did peek down at Khaled, now and then Ayeesha felt her son as sweet as Turkish chocolates, yes, or the plumpest, pinkest pomegranate on a windy little tree.

  “That’s enough,” says Shama. “I have seen the boy, and now I have to go.” It’s late, it’s true. She’s collected all the plates and leavings, and has been squatting for a while, not flat-bottomed on the floor. No longer in her ordinary place, she’s not far from the door. How quickly time goes by with Shama. It seems to me she has hardly even entered and laid the soup beside me. She says, quite serious now and no longer playing games, “The children will be coming back.” We pause in a round silence. Our aging ears grow large. There, yes. As though she’s conjured them herself, I can hear them in the alley, kicking-growling at the sand, yelping at each other, and descending like a storm. Does Shama want to be upstairs before the children come? Because as I’ve been leading her towards little Khaled, outside coming back from soccer practice there’s another boy named Jussa who has no idea what once happened in his name.

  Upstairs on the landing, Shama’s husband’s mother has rolled over to the steps, which is as far as she can go, and so precarious for her it is probably quite thrilling. “Shama!” She calls Shama’s name three times—and Shama, with whom I am ensnared, does smile over at me. “Call three times and no more,” she whispers, because that’s anybody’s due. Call four times, however, we both know, you don’t deserve an answer. But Shama’s got no right of refusal, which no doubt happens when you marry. The bibi shouts Shama’s name again, and says, in a voice like brakes on a big bus, to me, “What, you think she has no family?” My turn now to seek sympathy in Shama’s unseen friend. “All right, old man, I’m going up the stairs now.” She’s standing in the doorway, and the dusty light from my small window catches at her face. There’s something green about her skin this time of day—green but fresh, not dying.

  “All right,” I say. “But you’ll come back tonight.” If one of Shama’s children has given her a gift (Tasleem, who works so well at Walvis Travel she now owns two pairs of glasses, or Kamila, who crochets coats for armchairs on the side), Shama will buy paraffin for me and we won’t talk in the dark. I’ll watch the light on Shama’s face and think how beautiful we are. “Tonight you’ll bring a lamp, or what?” I say.

  Shama’s skin goes slack. “Look here,” Shama says, putting on a teacher voice—we all of us had British masters once, or some who liked to speak as though they were. “Look here.” Shama’s peering down now, as though made curious by her feet. “No?” I say. “No lamp?” Shama’s collected up the tray and bowl, and she’s also found a dank old shirt I’d long forgotten in the corner. She’s tucked this rag between her elbow and her waist. “We’ll see,” she says, and I can tell there’s something else. “What, no boy for you?” I ask. I’m smiling, though the ground is getting soft. Shama raises her small head again and frowns at me exactly as her uncle Akberali used to do if I asked him not to go. A frown with half the brow only but with a twisting of the nostrils. I tell myself with Shama just as I did with Akberali that this frown is full of love. Standing in the doorway, Shama says, “Old man.” She shifts the tray from left to right in her thin arms, then left again, as though trying to deceive it. “It’s Wednesday,” Shama says, examining the tray. “You know there is a film on.” There, she’s said it. And while we always act as though we have forgotten, and though I tell myself it’s nothing anymore, Shama’s hurt my feelings.

  I compete with the night shows for my Shama’s attention, which is why I’ve put unlikely country girl Ayeesha so wildly on the screen. “There’ll be films in my little story too, Shama, for you. I put it there for no one else but you.” I’ve planned, in fact, a screen career for Khaled. But Shama’s already stepped into the hallway. She doesn’t look into my eyes or promise anything. She points her heavy back at me and if she speaks again she will be speaking to the stairwell. “Oh,” I say. “A film.” Shama says, I think, “That’s right.”

  I look down at my feet—such mounds under the blanket! I look away from them. Usually as she goes up, Shama’s steps are slow, but today they have a quickness, as though something very bright upstairs were much better than me. When I first moved in below—before I was cast out by that enormous bibi, after I’d put wheels on her, mind you—I’d go up and watch the films. Don’t think I don’t remember, like a smoker near a cigarette or drinker by the coffeepot I was, no film I could miss. Though Shama cannot hear me, I go on: “A film, is it? A film?” So be it. I’ll wait. In the meantime I will fashion second sisters.

  It was because I told Shama I had seen a hundred films that she started coming down to see me after I was banished. As I’ve said, Shama likes the pictures. Everybody does, and though Shama’s husband’s mother is a crazy woman now, when they first installed the set—courtesy of Tasleem and Kamila, with their mad inflows of cash—the films had quite an audience. Children from the neighborhood would tumble up the stairs with screams and slaps and giggles, especially the dark ones, whose parents don’t have funds for modern sets, or any sets at all, and sometimes the big bibi’d even call the coffee salesman, whom she wanted to impress. Already she was far too large to leave the house, and it was something grand for her to bring folk up to see that she was still alive, a
nd well in touch with the big world. I haven’t yet asked Shama, but will soon, if the bibi came into her marriage slender, went upstairs a light and shapely thing, and then began to eat so much she couldn’t get back down. I also wonder what her long-dead husband thought, if he fed her sweets and did not fix the stairs with foresight, because he feared that she might leave. Of course while I complain about the bibi, and make much of her great weight, I’m not one to talk. I became a tenant here with feet I could still manage, ankles barely thick, and very full of feeling. I could, at first, still identify my toes, but the more I stayed, the more massive they became. Now, after five years, I trip on them, they’re only frills like lace above a soft and rounded mass. Bibi can’t come down, and I’m not welcome up.

  Before I moved into the house—because Akberali took me if the toothless wife was gone—I had already been upstairs. When he died I had seen five films there already, and of course the thuggish newscasts. When I arrived with my old clothes in a basket and a chit to say that I was born once in a hospital, I already knew that Shama’s sister was an absence, and the bibi was a force. Tasleem and Kamila were, in those days, fun to be with, young and clever women (loving sisters both, and still today a busy pair). Tasleem had been deserted by her husband, and Kamila, to keep up, thought she might be soon, though it hadn’t happened yet. She came with kids in tow. When I first got the downstairs room, I thought, How wonderful, I’ll watch television daily. I will sit among the girls and children, and witness Akberali’s smile on that hunchbacked Shama’s face. And for a while, I did.

  Tasleem and Kamila, who still spoke with me then, would sometimes come to fetch me, calling me their uncle. “Come up, Uncle! Tonight Sangam! Air Force love and suicide! Nothing you can miss!” or “Tonight an oldie, Alam Ara! Gypsy queens and princes, Uncle. You had better come.” And the three of us would make our way up the chipped blue stairs. Shama would have cut up some bananas, or made simsim bars to eat. The boys, still young, not yet enamored of kung fu, would sprawl below the soft brown sofa, legs and hands entangled, eyes agoggle at the screen. All of us together rapt with love and singing in the mountains, bloodshed, tears, and fate. Shivering at stab wounds, nodding at the gunshots, feeling not for just the lovers or the parents or the beggars, or the lost souls of the villains, but for all of them at once. Sometimes, too, pretending tears and laughing all the while. I am good at both, and they were glad to have me.

  Even Bibi, already crawling in those days, not able to stand, managed giggles here and there. After so many years of being stuck upstairs and only guessing at what saunters in the world, Bibi found a novelty in me. A man no longer on the move, a stranger, someone Akberali praised, not related to them, someone who had traveled, amenable to talk. A very tray of treats, I was. And at first I loved her, too. For example, when faced with but a single sweetmeat remaining on a plate and all the awkwardness of shall-I-take-or-not, I would slide the saucer towards her so the fit girls couldn’t see. Quietly, without a word about her seeping flesh or heart or “pressure” or her bursting too-tight clothes or how the fat was squeezing all the hair out of her head, I thought, Let her get the things she loves, or what. I did like it up there with the family. I wanted if I could to please each one in turn.

  After watching one nice film in which a legless baba rolls all over India on a wooden board with wheels, looking for his son, I had my idea. I’d make a board like that for Bibi. So I did. I went out in the morning and I traded things for wheels. I watched Yusuf’s Hardware Shop for him while he went out for something secret, for example, and I cleaned out Hamed’s storeroom. I gave Omar what he wanted. Came home with four wheels and screws and tools Yusuf had lent me.

  I gave the roller board to Bibi just before we watched Deewar, where mother-love turns ugly, as it will, and mama makes a choice between her children. She blinked at me until she understood, and then she squeezed my arm. How could I have known that putting Bibi on the rollers would let her sneak around and come upon things in the stillness that she wouldn’t understand? Boys, I tell you. Trouble.

  I can hear them finish eating up there. Glass on glass, and metal-water sounds. The children talking nonsense, and Tasleem and Kamila—not so fine as they once were—make a din that more and more resembles Bibi’s. Age will change a voice, of course, and tone. Complain-complaining now, they are. Sounds that say nothing’s good enough, Can you believe that Walvis, chasing after boys, and Don’t you know I made four jackets for the sofa set and they’ve paid me just for three saying too-too much yes miss we cannot afford, as though afford-afford I can, and more, and other things I cannot really hear. Shama’s quiet, though, and I tell myself perhaps the sister tale is working. Perhaps she will come back with more than waterbread and tea. I wait. It’s very dark downstairs, though the upper rooms are bright with electricity, the TV and some bulbs. Outside I know the vendors have come out with tiny oil lamps and that people see what they are eating. Upstairs, it’s also eating time. In my own room, ink black. Darkness is the best for thinking of cold things. Let’s try to tell the truth.

  To look at little Jussa now, you wouldn’t know that when he was a child his parents (Tasleem and a man whose name cannot be spoken in the house) thought he would not live. Too thin, he was, nothing like that Khaled we are working with, who is plump and rich and fine. Jussa’s limbs had no flesh on them to pinch or even speak of, no matter what he ate. It took three years for him to try his feet, and even then, he wobbled like an eel. Then he would fall down in a heap like twigs made out of string, and down he’d stay until a person picked him up. When I moved in, the boy was four and hopeless still. Tasleem had maalims tramping in and out, with bowls and pens and water, incense, leaves to burn, and everything, a new trick every day. She brought a Maasai woman once, a wrinkled one who smelled so strongly of things Tasleem announced she could not bear or name she washed the steps with rose marashi after. Nothing doing, Jussa couldn’t walk. My own feet were showing signs, back then, swelling, losing memory. Hard for me to make it up the stairs, what with one foot and another. The day our bibi rolled into the parlor and attacked me with a spoon, I was sitting on the sofa with the tired, broken boy. Bear down, shall we? I will tell it as it was.

  Shama was asleep. Her husband, long-bald by this time, but not yet so astounded by the world or by his mother that he couldn’t rise from bed, had gone out to buy a prayer cap or something. Tasleem was at work. Kamila, not yet free of her own man, still prospered on the waterfront with hopes for love and joy. Jussa’s older brothers, boys who’d run and jumped from birth, were still at school and not expected back. I had gone upstairs because, as I have said, I was still welcome in those days, and downstairs it was lonely.

  It was legs, you see, not—as Bibi later said, when she announced to Shama in case Shama didn’t know that since the house belonged to Bibi she could banish whom she chose—it was legs, and not salaciousness, or anything like that. I do know how to work with flesh. It’s true, it’s true I worked the beaches in my time, massage-massage-and-cash. Now a stroke and now a squeeze. I can bring relief. A hand feels good on bones that want some softness. I was sitting on the sofa, thinking how wonderful to have a fan awhirring on the ceiling, and how brave it was of Shama to have hung a painted picture of naked-Adam-naked-Eve in that green garden by the tree, right above the cabinets where the lightbulb showed it off. I heard Jussa make a sound in the dark room behind the television set, and I went in to look.

  Just five years old, he was, but his square head looked large as a small man’s, because the rest of him was sticks. “Come on,” I said. “It’s cool in the front room.” Always burning with a fever, that boy was, a red-coal child from all the danger in the world. I lifted him from his hot bed and brought him out onto the sofa. It will be better by the fan, I thought, and also, if those doctors and the Maasai ladies have all but given up on you, little bwana Jussa, I promise I will not. When you move into a house and don’t know everything there is, you think you’ll turn things upside down, just as I
had thought when I put Bibi on the rollers. Jussa was looking at the ceiling, limp, breath scratching at the air. In the kitchen, Bibi clinked the cups and bowls together, out of anger, maybe, not related to the cooking or the cleaning, just a clattering to register complaints.

  I told Jussa a story about a shipwreck and the children of a sailor whose first wife had been a djinn, and how, when the human children found his body and staged a burial for their dad, the djinn kids had to watch it from the high crest of a palm tree since they weren’t wanted down below. Jussa said he’d like to sail a ship and wondered what it was to go swimming in the water. “You’ll go swimming yet,” I said. He slipped his legs onto my lap, and I thought, completely innocent, you see, I will rub his ankles.

  It was my own ankles smarting, too, and my feeling-nothing feet. I know what sorry limbs are like, I thought. He seemed to fall asleep and then wake up, and sigh, and shiver now and then, and I thought, Oh, it helps. His skin was very hot, and fine, like onions. And the eyelashes around his too-big eyes got damp and very dark. In my big hand his knees were tinier than dwarf limes. His poor thin thighs weren’t like thighs at all. I thought, if I do this enough the Jussa boy will walk! Such faith, you think! Such determination. The fan spun on and on, and Bibi’s clatter faded, and Jussa’s round eyes closed, and so did my own eyes, you see, I slept right there, too. And next.

  And next the bibi rolled into the television room and threw the spoon at me. It was me she meant to hurt, but as I woke up I saw that she’d hit Jussa on the head. And next the boy was crying and when boys are crying in that way, well, what are you to think? Enormous Bibi got her voice together in a ball at the bottom of her throat and screamed at me like a komba in a tree. I won’t say how much she batted at me from her round place on the floor with her fat hands, and how she growled and I was pelted down the stairs. I fell, too, at the bottom, hurt my ankle and my knee. Lay there like a pile of Jussa twigs myself. Bibi got settled on the rollers I had made and hurled things down at me. She must have gathered them along the way, top speed: a cup, a knife, a cooking book of Shama’s, and Tasleem’s makeup bag. Salacious. Don’t come back, she said. You’re an animal, she said. I’ll have you thrown out of this house.