Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  He said, After the war, I went to your house and your uncle was angry and he told me you were getting married. I thought there was no more hope with you. I tried to stop thinking about you. When something is not working, I move on. I do not linger.

  He was telling me what he remembered. But I had his letters and he did not stop writing to me that he loved me all through the war in Bangladesh and after.

  I am building a school in Sind province, he said. I am raising the money and finding teachers. Perhaps my sons will teach music but also they have their own lives now.

  He paused and said, I may be telling you more than you want to know.

  I want to know everything about you.

  Sometimes I felt a parchedness in him as if he had been too alone with his thoughts. I asked why he was so interested in talking over what happened to us, and he answered, You were the only other one who was there.

  There was an industrial area down by the river where Kamal and I sometimes dared to walk together, among people without beds, among people who heard voices, who ate and drank and smoked things that numbed them. We shared their delicate company in that place where the river flows out to the sea. Sometimes a person gestured to Kamal for a cigarette, or saluted with a bottle, but no one ever spoke to us. People there wanted to be invisible and they made room for us with them. We still dared not touch.

  I told him that I liked what we were doing.

  Talking? he asked. We always talked a lot, even when we were young. I asked if I had been shy, said that we were together a short time, a few years. He said, I do not think that you were shy. Is a short time bad?

  No, I said. Life can change in an instant.

  Kamal said, Talking is not all that I want to do with you. We have to do something about making love. We already have, you know.

  I was startled at this boldness and liked it and resisted it too. His mother had not been murdered for love and he had not been forced into marriage. I felt his coiled urgency and it filled me with pleasure. When I was young it felt like he would devour me. He wanted to devour everything back then. I did too. He had not stopped loving me, and he was not afraid to tell me. After all the years.

  He said, When your uncle told me you were marrying, I believed you were afraid to say so in your letters. I gave up and decided to marry too.

  I told him they had brought me home from school and taken my passport and forced me.

  When did you marry? I asked.

  August nineteenth, 1972.

  I started to laugh and he smiled with me and asked, What are we laughing at?

  We married on the same day.

  Mahsa, he said. He put his arm around my shoulder and I reached up and touched his hand and felt the shock of his flesh, again, familiar and natural, the first man’s hand I touched that was not Abbu’s.

  When I heard your student tape, he said softly, I heard riffs only I would know. Even if you were not playing for me, you were playing for me. Were you?

  I said to him, I cannot risk anything happening to Lailuma.

  We walked by three men sitting in a circle passing around a bottle in a brown paper bag. One of them raised his fingers in greeting to Kamal who nodded back.

  Kamal said, I have not asked you to.

  Does this feel right?

  To want to make love?

  To do what we are doing.

  Perhaps.

  We have been talking for a long time now, haven’t we? Has it been years? I shifted a little away from him and he dropped his arm from my shoulders and we continued to walk side by side, our shoulders brushing, but mostly separate again.

  Kamal said, There is an Afghan expression that I am thinking of. God says, Start moving so that I may start blessing.

  Heaven is dark yet from it streams clear water.

  I had almost forgotten how feeling feels. I was often distracted by his skin’s scent and the light in his eyes and often I had to ask him to repeat. There was a frequent tripping over each other’s words, waiting, as we deprived each other of touch.

  Did you ever go back to Afghanistan?

  I did.

  What happened?

  I was working there, and I went to find my father. He left the city and academic life to fight. I found him deep in a mountain. He sat on a worn carpet of red and blue and green. His beard was long and he was sinewy and thin. His face had been burned. Before I could see him in the darkness of the cave, I heard his voice, Son, you have endured a difficult journey.

  He was blinded by a mine hidden in a thermos but he recognized my smell. He was a teacher, not made for fighting. It was after the Soviets, the beginning of the Taliban, and he joined men who knew nothing but war.

  That is how humans are. They do something. Even if it is the wrong thing.

  Kamal said, My father had to give up his rubab. All music was forbidden and in the great stadium they executed the instruments, smashed and burned them. But Plaar buried his, wrapped it and hid it underground. He said to me, A bird only flies as high as his wings take him. There are many things to do in life. I must stay here. You go and teach.

  I told him, I got my wings from you.

  So I left him there. I walked back out of the mountains and got across the border and I knew I would not see him again and I did not. Have you ever been?

  No. I was always afraid of what my relatives might do. Blood will have blood. But I met a man from Helmand in Karachi. He lost his legs in the war. He used to sit outside a store near my school. He’d say to people passing by, Did you send for my legs yet? I’m waiting for my legs. That is all I need to go back and be a shepherd again.

  Kamal said, We Afghans have relentless hope. I travelled in the mountains, guided by a young boy whose skin was already weathered, who wore a neat and threadbare coat over layers of sweaters. I walked behind him and looked down into a valley and saw the empty space of sky. Below, a woman wrapped head to foot in a red burqa stood in the doorway, alone. She was the only colour on the grey mountain.

  I said, I have not thought of these things for many years. I feel at home with you. In Karachi I saw little Pashto girls still wearing short skirts in the marketplaces, practising the dignified, straight-backed movements of their mothers. Those children shed awkwardness early, copy the dignity of the adults. I saw little girls doing all the things women did, carrying babies and shopping bags, and soon they would do these things covered by a veil or a burqa. They would eat ice cream under the veil. These are the images I have of my mother’s people though I never went there.

  We did not talk about your parents when we were young. Why?

  There were many things we did not talk about. We could not.

  Why?

  I was ashamed.

  And I was impatient about what I could not change, he said. Patience is not a quality a young man thinks about. Now I can admit my mistakes. When I was a young man, I could not show weakness. Tell me about your parents.

  I told him about their dancing and Abbu’s movies. I told him that Abbu took me to hear Dizzy Gillespie play at the Palace Cinema when I was six years old, and that we heard Jack Teagarden and Artie Shaw at the Rex Cinema Hall. I told him about the day I was called from class to learn that Mor and Abbu were dead.

  Mor was her father’s favourite, the only child of his third and youngest wife who was his pretty second cousin and did not read or write. Her father was impressed by the Americans he met in the Helmand Valley and he had sacrificed for Mor to be educated and to learn English, but he had never dreamed that she might run away with one of them. How fearless she must have been to leave everyone she knew for an American stranger. When her half-brothers from Helmand found out that Abbu and Mor had not gone to America but were still in Karachi, they said, karo, kari, black man, black woman. In Pashto they said, Kill them for their transgression.

  Here, in Montreal, this story seemed from another world. I said to Kamal, As the sun’s shadow shifts, so there is no permanence on earth.

  Forgive me, Mah
sa, he said. I should have asked you about them. I did not know how when I was young.

  There is nothing to forgive. I could not speak about it. I loved them so much. Lailuma and Asif still do not know how they died. I do not want this to be their family story.

  Perhaps someday, he said. He asked me many questions then, where my father was from, how they eloped. I asked, Do you remember me playing for you “Kansas City”?

  Kamal said, Of course, I remember all your music. Zan, zar, zamin. Much blood has been spilled. Your parents are the legendary lovers of Karachi.

  I asked him, Are you and I legendary lovers?

  Of course, he said, except we did not stay together.

  When I told you I was leaving, you were angry.

  I do not remember that.

  Did we find love again?

  Our questions were a way to be close. Love thrives in perfect freedom. When we were young we learned together the burdenlessness of love. People always want the next thing. People are tempted away from the exquisiteness of the waiting-moment.

  I was curious about his letters and I went to read them at Monique’s. In his last letter he said that he hoped I liked life in Montreal, that what we shared in Karachi was a different life.

  I remembered this as the end of us. But he had continued on the second page: I know what we were and I have not stopped loving you, but I do not know what we are now.

  Kamal said, I kept your letters too.

  Did you read them?

  I was afraid to. Did I think the paper would burn my fingers? I thought maybe I had got it all wrong.

  I misremembered your last one. It was after the war in East Pakistan.

  What did I write?

  Mostly that you loved me. I remembered that you said it was over but you did not say that.

  Kamal shook his head. He said, I learned in the war that when something was going to hurt, powerful men did not flinch. Either a swift flight or a swift blow. I threw myself into everything, but especially things that hurt. When pain was coming at me, I took it and got in close and learned how to inflict. I hope in my letters I was not unkind.

  As he talked I watched the sunlight through a cloud.

  But you were afraid to read my letters.

  Yes.

  When we were young, you had other girls. Why?

  In those days, there were girls who were friends and girls for the rest. You were young. I always wanted to spend time with you. Later I knew that I wanted to be with you. It felt strange, like a leap, trying to bring these things together.

  What made you take the leap?

  You did.

  KATHERINE

  The living are in a hurry. The dying can wait. Death does not come fast enough at the end and the moment of death is too quick. I was pacing, thinking she was asleep, and she opened her eyes and startled me when she spoke. She said, Katie, you always were impatient.

  The nurse was cleaning her up and remaking the bed, and I drummed softly on the bed railing, chanted as much for the nurse as for her,

  What you gonna do when the bed breaks down? Tried it on the sofa.

  Tried it on the chair.

  Tried it on the window.

  Didn’t get nowhere.

  What you gonna do when the bed breaks down?

  I wished I had loved her more. Why hadn’t she told me about Sean? I tried to let go of the things that Ma and I never worked out. Her life. My life. When she went into the coma Sean said, She knows we are here.

  I asked the doctor, Does she?

  The doctor said, There are many kinds of knowing. Be with her.

  And then, a night and another day and a night. I was sure she squeezed my hand. People have twitches. I talked to her, sang to her. You cannot leave alone the breathing, still-warm body but the outside flesh becomes cool. A person grunts and rasps toward death, listen to the ragged breath, stop, start, unplayable rhythm, wait wait wait, suck in again, wait wait, rasp out, and wait, wait and wait and then.

  (I wondered if my father in China was still alive. I would have told him that she was strong to the end. I would have told him that he should have tried harder with her. I would have wanted to hear about his life. I would have wanted him to know that she found someone, that she was not alone, but that she did not stop loving him, she still said he was handsome when she showed me the wedding photo. I would have told him that I wished I could have met him, once.)

  MAHSA

  Now, I said to Kamal.

  He answered, Are you sure?

  We walked hand in hand to his place. I called it the tree house because it was high above Montreal and looked down over the river. It was austere. A table and a wide bed and windows that opened to the stars and moon, and we were wrapped in darkness, and breathed light. After all the many years, we made love again, and we remembered a few things, yes many and beautiful things, and observed some new things, our senses open and excited. Our bodies were different graves now, shallower, filling quickly, two lifetimes of high-hatted and passing joys that made lighter the years of duty and displacement and earning livings and raising children. We were two people who had tended our hope. He took and gave what was his, listening to me. I opened the door for him and I took and gave what was mine. And we touched and kept listening to each other after the years of waiting, our love a great failed love, fleeting as spring ice. Love has many expres-sions and cannot be forced or judged. Its quickened breath cannot be quieted and it cannot be made a tyranny. All forms of love are right.

  He asked, Do you believe in fate?

  Destiny is a donkey. It goes wherever you lead it.

  Yes, he said. I think that is right. And then he sang for me. I love his voice singing. One note is a sound, two notes a song.

  KATHERINE

  The divine is alive. It needs room to split your skull. In other places people cut their bodies in mourning and dress in rags and sit in the dust, but there were things I had to do. I had to sign papers and empty our old apartment and take her clothes to the Sally Ann. Sean said to me, I cannot do this. I told him I’d do it, I had T and the kids to help, and it took less than a day to wipe her traces away. Sean went home and I went to the Connaught to say goodbye to the people in the kitchen and I saw the Colonel and he said, Well, Mrs. Goodnow? I answered, I’m not Mrs. Goodnow, that was my mother. I went to visit Lily upstairs. She said, I don’t think I’ll rent it again. It’s going to be strange to be alone in the house after all these years. Do I owe you the first month’s rent? I said no and thank you and keep in touch and I asked her if she still played hearts and she said, It would be nice to play again but it’s not much good with two and I said, Well we were the four dames, weren’t we? After that I was in a hurry to go back to New York because here I was like a swallow on a window ledge separate from the life inside the room, so I handed Lily the keys and walked away for the last time from Mountain Brow and I felt a weight like a bucket of heavy ashes blow off me. You can mourn and still be released.

  Back home, I slept. Everyone came in and out and T and Jimmie left to play in Boston. One morning I woke up and I hardly knew how many days had gone by but the light was crisp. I could taste the bitterness of my coffee. It was a slowcreeping feeling of still being alive after being gone for a long long time, receiving and ready. As a child I used to look at grass and sky and wish I had made all this. I put my fingers on the keys and made a sound and another and another and I heard the opening vamp of “New Thing at the Surf Maid.” It was already in me. Marian McPartland called and said she was getting her agent to book a tour to Asia for me. She said, Cecil can go too. Jazz is hot there, and you’re free now to go.

  Ma, things came together for me after you died. It felt like an Art Tatum two-finger run, it was fast and light and fully formed. Ma, I hope there is love for you wherever you are. You would have liked this piece, but mostly I think you would have wished to be still alive. There should have been more time for you. I got up early in the morning and wrote and in the afternoons if there w
ere no paying gigs, I walked in Central Park until twilight. It was a simple routine and calmer than I have ever lived and I was happy though I have never cared about being happy.

  I wrote “New Thing” quickly in three parts. It begins with love and ends with death. In the middle is struggle. The gods want to fill you. All you have to do is keep making room for them.

  I sent the charts to Mahsa and she phoned, laid the receiver on her piano and played it back to me. She said, It is good, Katherine.

  I said, It’s not done.

  She said, I know.

  It is love we do not talk about enough. People talk about sex all the time, never stop talking about it. Ideas were pouring out of me. You have to keep doing it all. You have to keep chasing your favourite things. Don’t stop. Don’t wait. Keep going.

  Mahsa mailed me a clipping from the Gazette with a photograph of a wedding ceremony, a young man and woman facing each other, holding hands. The love in their eyes shone through the newsprint. They were delighted with each other. He wore a casual checkered short-sleeved shirt and she wore her hair down. The girl’s name was Jassi and her family owned blueberry fields on the West Coast. She had been offered in marriage to one of her father’s business associates, forty years older than she was. Jassi had other ideas. She fell in love on a family trip to India with Mitthu, a rickshaw driver, and she ran away and married him. One night driving on his motorbike along a dark road, they were stopped and her throat was slit and her body left in shallow water. Mitthu too was left for dead but he survived. Telephone records and bank statements and family business connections pointed to Jassi’s family hiring out the murder in India. But nothing was done.

  Mahsa wrote on the scrap of newspaper: Katherine, write this.

  My piece started with the old couple in the Brooklyn deli and turned into something else. It was Lucia di Lammermoor. It was Jenny Goodnow. I wrote it for two pianos and I put in Mahsa’s “I Miss You, Mor” and I phoned her every morning to play the next new bit. I put in power and law. I put in sex. And longing. And love and grief. I put in everything I had ever thought. I took it to Harvey Lichtenstein at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and told him, Here is a story to tell. Bea’s going to choreograph it. Let’s find some dancers to perform it. I’ve got the other pianist.