by Kim Echlin
I went to school the minimum I could which no one bothered me about because I did well without trying hard. I went enough to write my exams. On the last day of school I collected my report card and my graduation diploma and one of the girls wrote in my yearbook:
For Katherine:
A girl who is different—style and dress
A girl who don’t give a cent for men—
and for the boys still less!
See you in New York star-girl!
I showed my diploma to Ma and she said, I don’t know how you did it, all the skipping you did.
I was heading out to play for ballet classes and she said, You’re lucky, Katie, you’ve got a talent you can make money with. How about I bake a cake tonight to celebrate? You’re the first girl in the family to graduate.
But I said, Ma, I’ve got a gig tonight.
MAHSA
The best thing Abbu ever brought home was a moving picture projector and an 8mm home movie camera and he made films about me and Mor and people in our neighbourhood. When he wanted to show his trip from America, he laid out a map of the world and we tied a thread to a little metal plane and I pulled it along over the map from Kansas to the ocean and then to Lashkar Gah while he shot the film. Then he stopped and tied the thread to a plastic camel and I pulled that from Afghanistan to Karachi to show where he and Mor came from. I asked, Did you really ride a camel all the way here? He laughed and said, No, but it will look better for our movie. I watched him put the film together in different orders with a metal film splicer and some glue. Sometimes I helped him make titles. We drew A day at the beach in the sand and he asked me to write it in Urdu too, and then we filmed the waves erasing them. He filmed Mor walking into the ocean with me eating Kwality ice cream. Sometimes he filmed the bands and dancing in the clubs where he went with Mor at night. Projected up on the bedsheet I saw the shadowy life of adults, dancing and laughing together. They looked like children playing but dressed up in ties and high heels. Abbu used to watch the images, especially of the bands, and say, This scene needs music, then he would jump up and go over to the piano. Sometimes Mor and I watched his movies by ourselves when Abbu was working late at the university. She liked to see the pictures he made of me as a baby. She looked young. I asked her if we had pictures of Lashkar Gah and she said, Abbu did not have the camera then, and it would be difficult to take pictures there. You will be free like me. Our people say, Know the mother, know the daughter. She said this seriously and then she laughed and played the movie of Abbu holding me as a baby. She said, I filmed that one.
I did want to be like her.
After they were murdered and I had to live with Aunt and Uncle, for a long time I came home from school and stayed in my room alone. I set up the projector to watch the movies by myself. I could see us all together happy, soundlessly waving and smiling and laughing and talking to the camera. A couple of times Uncle found me doing this and told me to put it away and study.
Most of the time he left me alone. In bed I lay in the dark and went through my catalogue of everything I could think about Abbu and Mor to help me remember: the way her bottom teeth crossed a little and the length of her painted fingernails and the scar on her left hand and how serious she could be when she was trying to teach me something and how we would end up laughing anyway, and Abbu saying the summer was so hot it hurt even to move his eyes and going with him on the clattering tram to Paradise Point, or fishing at Cape Monze and sitting between him and Mor in a horse carriage to Clifton Beach.
I could not sleep well and when I was awake I felt not awake but grieving. One dawn after a restless night when I heard the morning Bismillahir rahmanir rahim I decided to feign illness again that day to stay in bed and not go to school. I wanted my parents so badly that I got up and I threaded a film into Abbu’s film projector and started to watch. The images were faint on the wall. I liked listening to the soothing ticka ticka of the machine. Suddenly my door was thrown open and Uncle walked in.
It is morning and you do this, he said. What about school? He tore the film off the projector and picked up the others and dumped them out of their tin cases into my waste paper basket. Then he pulled a matchbook from his pocket, lit it and threw it in. I screamed and tried to reach in and pull out the unravelled films but he pulled me away and pushed me onto the bed and stood listening to the films cracking and melting and I heard Aunt outside my door not doing anything to help me and I was crying and the burning film smelled acrid like rotting radish, and when it was all a ruined mess I had lost my Abbu and Mor all over again. Uncle turned to me and said, Get ready for school.
*
The sisters at St. Joseph’s asked me to play piano for our school operetta, “Little Gypsy Gay.” I told them we did not have a piano at home to practise on anymore. Sister Devan said, You can practise here, and I will contact your aunt and see what else we can do.
Aunt persuaded Uncle to allow her to take me on Saturday mornings to the 007 Club in the Beach Luxury to practise piano while he played field hockey at a maidan in the suburb of Cincinnati-town. I loved those Saturdays away from school and their apartment. Aunt dropped me at the door and disappeared until noon and I could do whatever I liked. For a long time I played only music that Abbu had taught me.
KATHERINE
T Minor stood apart and aloof when he played. His sidemen listened hard to him because they could never predict where he was going. I liked to watch his eyelids begin to droop, looking for a place he had not been before. He was a man on a rock face getting pulled toward terrifying eddies. A beat away from oblivion, heading into the night’s brutality, the night’s new thing. He bent the sound of his soprano sax around dark corners and did jigs in louvred light and after a long, long time resurfaced. He drank blood from the underworld, listened to grieving-for-life ghosts before turning to go home on a sax odyssey where he played for nymphs and daughters of man-eaters, and a long-waiting son. T played desire drawn out to breathlessness, holding, holding, balancing along the wire’s edge, until his eyes opened again and he breathed and brought the notes back to the beginning. I saw him look over at me, checking me out, and I was concentrating like crazy to keep up, and feeling what it felt like to be checked out by him on stage. Even when we were in front of an audience, I always felt as if we were alone together. The first time he tried to kiss me, quick, after a show, I told him my mother was waiting for me, but he did not believe me and he did not relent. He put his arms around me and he whispered in his low voice, Tell a real woman-lie, girl, tell your mama you were out dancing with your friends. Night after night he was talking with me and taking a kiss and touching my hand but always I felt him most intense when we were on stage.
One night I went alone to the Downstairs Club on McNab. Peter Appleyard was playing and I wanted to hear him, but mostly I wanted the people who came to listen to him to hear me. I put on my hat, walked down the marble stairs, slid through the club entrance that was wallpapered with Folkways album covers. I did not pay admission to the guy at the desk. I’m playing, I said. He looked confused but waved me past the seedy red leather walls behind him into the club. There was a broken cigarette machine on one side and a tiny plywood stage with a beat-up piano. The ceiling was a maze of black painted pipes. No one was playing and I did my usual trick, walked onto the stage, sat down at the piano and started to play. The tables had red-checked tablecloths and I do not know how many people were in there, maybe thirty.
That night I misjudged. The audience came for Appleyard. The manager did not like a girl invading his stage, even a lousy piece of plywood. They were serving Coke and vanilla but people had smoked and drunk and shot up before they arrived to settle in on those noisy wooden chairs. A guy who was wasted shouted into the tiny room, Take your clothes off, sweetheart.
I played harder. Did not hide. Wished I could. You need a burning desire. It takes guts. And then I saw T in the doorway and he walked right over and stood in front of the heckler. When I was done T clapped, all alo
ne, until a few people joined him, and the manager came out to tell me to get off the stage and T said, Let’s go, and I said, I’m not running away. I’m staying.
So we sat down and listened to the set and I was thinking like crazy because I knew if I did not want to go with T I should get out of there before the set was over. He intended to stand up and walk out with me. He intended that it was going to be T ’n me that night. It was the end of seduction and I had to decide. One way or another. I let him walk out with me. I did not say, Drop me at the bus stop. We drove to a motel at Cootes Paradise. Maybe this was something he did regularly because he already had a key balanced out of sight above the door jamb and all we had to do was park the band’s big Chevrolet in front of door No. 9 and walk into that little room. I guess he did not know how old I was. I did not know how old he was and I did not care. I guess it played on his mind that I was half white. I did not care about that either because I was not born in the southern states of America where men got lynched for doing what he was going to do with me that night. It was a sweet night, and I think T was surprised it was my first time. I woke him up at dawn to try it again and the second time it was very good and I understood why the world needs the word quenchless. He held my head against his shoulder and I was tracing my fingers over his beautiful skin, and I loved the little moons on my fingernails against his sax-playing fingers. He said, My granddaddy used to call my grandma his best girl. Would you be my best girl?
So this was what Ma had been warning me against all these years. This sacred thing. This beautiful thing. Ma always said, Once it starts, a girl gets lost to herself. It would have been more helpful to give me some ideas about birth control but she did not. She was right. From the first time with T Minor I knew that I liked this kind of being lost. I liked the feeling of this cheap motel with the smoky paisley curtains.
Can I be your best girl piano player too?
That’s how I got my husband and my first steady band.
MAHSA
I know the shared silences of those who deceive together. When Aunt came back to pick me up at the Beach Luxury on Saturday mornings, she looked happier and flushed but we never spoke of where she went and I never mentioned her absences. I think Aunt loved me very much for keeping her secret but I did not love her. She was a rag in a dry sink. She was Uncle’s cousin and she had been promised to him at birth. Her lips were thin from being held tight and she was sixteen years younger than he was and she never looked him in the eye. She had known Mor in Lashkar Gah. She told me stories about family picnics at the great ruins of the Ghaznavid mansions. Mor’s brothers were jealous that their father spent money for her to go to school. The men were jealous too of Uncle for moving away, and after the Americans came to build the dams everything changed and many of the herdsmen were made to give up their herds to make room for the dam projects. The men who were resistant got their herds shot down in a single afternoon of carnage, rolling eyes and panicked squealing and blood and wasted meat and hides. Uncle was one of the first to leave and Aunt told me this with pride as if his accomplishments were hers because she had none of her own. He came back to marry her and she had been frightened to leave everyone she knew to live in a foreign city.
She said, He learned to read and he worked in the hotel and then he began his carpet-selling business and now he has another business partner and is exporting to America.
I asked, Why did Mor’s brothers kill her?
Aunt put her finger to her lips and whispered though the only person at home was their servant, Minoo, an illiterate girl who was frightened of Uncle. Aunt said, Your Mor’s mother was her father’s favourite wife. The other wives did not accept her and made things difficult for her. She herself was young and she could not control your mother who was pretty. Especially after Breshna went to school she became headstrong.
And should be killed?
No, but a girl should not run away with a stranger.
She loved Abbu.
She was not married and she was pregnant.
This is my family’s memory. No memory is one’s own alone. I liked Mor’s and Abbu’s stories of falling in love better than Aunt’s story of transgression. Mor used to say, However tall the mountain, you will find a way to the top.
Aunt said, Your father did not understand our ways.
I always felt rage when she said things against Abbu. I loved him and he knew everything and he always made Mor and me laugh.
I said to Aunt, I am not going to be like you and do nothing all day. I want to be a musician.
My childhood began to grow distant, as if I were on a boat moving away from shore, and my parents stopped visiting me in bed. I was weary of grief, and one Saturday morning at the Beach Luxury when I was playing all alone in the 007 Club, a boy came in and startled me and asked, Do you know any jazz?
His eyes were shining black opals, warm and amused and interested. The club was always empty except for a waiter sleeping on a couch. I did not speak but played a childish version of “Autumn Leaves” and when it was clear that he was listening and staying, then I played for him “Kansas City” which I had made a good arrangement for. I looked at the clock and saw that Aunt would be still with her lover. The boy took a chair from the stacks by the wall and sat boldly near the piano and said, I like how you play. What is that last song?
It was the first time I had ever been alone with a man who was not Abbu or Uncle. I had talked to boys in the marching band from St. Patrick’s with my school friends, and we sometimes met them at the Manhattan Soda Fountain but this was different and I liked the feeling.
Little Willie Littlefield plays that song. My father taught it to me.
He asked, What is your name? and I told him.
My name is Kamal Jamal, he said. I’ve never seen you here before.
Then you have not come on Saturday morning because I always practise here on Saturday morning. My uncle is the night manager. Do you know the American Ahmad Jamal? He is one of my favourite piano players.
I do not know him but I will look for his records. Is your uncle here now?
I felt confused at his teasing tone and I answered seriously, No, he is the night manager. Why are you here?
I study at the university and there will be a conference here and I am making arrangements. You play very well. Do you know any show tunes?
I did not know what a show tune was but I thought perhaps it meant something from the movies and I played for him “As Time Goes By” and I hoped that was right. I felt as if my toe were dipping into a stream and I did not know yet if I would jump in or sit on the shore. When I finished he said, Play it again, Sam. For old times’ sake.
I said, I don’t know what you mean, Miss Ilsa.
Then he tipped back on his chair and said, Why did you come here?
I came for the waters.
But this is a dry and mountainous place.
I was misinformed.
He laughed and I looked at the clock because I felt heat gathering in the room and thought it must be getting close to noon. I said, I have to go.
Let me play for you too. I play very badly and I only know one song.
He banged notes, but I knew the melody from a popular Indian movie. I danced a little while he played, shoulders bouncing slowly at first, the way I practised with the girls at school. I turned my head with pursed lips, hands pointed in toward the ears, flirting hips. He was a noisy player and made the room feel like a party. People rarely came in when I practised but I saw some kitchen staff peek around the door, smiling, and I stopped dancing. I thought, Aunt will soon be here.
Kamal said, Mahsa, you dance well too.
All week I thought about him especially alone in my bed. The idea of him was new air that I suddenly needed, having never needed it before. I imagined that I was sitting in the trolley on the way to school and he sat across the aisle and talked with me, and I imagined that he appeared at my bedroom window and passed me a poem or a love message. When the real boy reappeared at
the Beach Luxury the next Saturday before Zuhr prayers, he was a little taller and his shoulders wider and his eyes were more beautiful than I remembered.
I knew he was there as soon as he came into the room but I kept playing as if I had not noticed him. The chairs and tables were stacked against the walls, the floors swept and wiped down after Friday night. Without pausing I changed keys and played “All the Things You Are” because I had worked out an arrangement that I liked and I wanted him to hear it. I glanced over and tried to look surprised that he was there and our eyes met and I had dressed for him and I had painted my nails pink which Uncle did not like, and I wore lipstick. When I finished he came closer and said, That was beautiful.
How was your conference?
I am still preparing it. I will have to come often here.
I lifted my hands from the keys and turned to him but I did not know what to say.
He asked, Why do you play all alone on Saturday mornings?
There is no piano at home. I am practising.
Who are your parents?
They died. My father was John Weaver and he too taught at a university, not yours but NED.
When I said my father’s name which was still painful inside me I watched to see if he had heard about what happened, but his eyes revealed nothing.
He asked, How old are you?
I am sixteen and soon I will write my exams. How old are you?
Nineteen.
I thought, Impossibly older.
He said, I study English. I want to teach. My father wanted me to be an engineer but I want to start schools all across the country.
