by Shamim Sarif
Amina ate quickly, then retraced her steps across the road to the door of the kitchen, which appeared now as a rectangle of orange light in the darkness. She glanced inside, but the cooks were busy and did not notice her. Leaving her plate on the top step she returned to her seat on the porch so that she might watch the front door of the restaurant and see the men when they emerged.
She looked for the children, but they had gone now, and she imagined them back in their houses, being bathed and given dinner. She had never thought about having children, but wondered now how her life would be if she did have them. Completely different, she decided. More routine, more settled. She would not be able to take off for a few days as she was doing now. She nodded to herself, but the thought had not comforted her quite as much as she had hoped it would.
In her shirt pocket was a pack of cigarettes. She shook one free and rolled it back and forth between her long fingers. She had not smoked at all in two years and rarely before that. She held the cigarette between her lips, taking some comfort in the feel of it, while she searched for her matches. Around her, the evening grew darker, the sky a deep ink blue. She could hear faintly the sound of insects, even on the main road where she sat. A car rolled by, its wheels crunching softly on the gravel-specked road. The hiss of her match against the rough wood of the porch was replaced by a burst of light, and she watched the flame as it twisted in the dusk. It looked to her like a taunting demon, dancing and stretching before her eyes. She quickly applied it to the cigarette and shook it out.
As she smoked, she concentrated very hard on Miriam and on not thinking about her. After a while she began to realise that, as a strategy, this was somewhat counter-productive.
“You’re an idiot, Amina,” she said out loud. She allowed herself a smile. “And now you’re talking to yourself.” She frowned. “You need to be logical,” she continued, somehow reassured to hear a human voice in the dark, even if it were only her own. “Be logical. Make a list. For and Against. Pros and Cons.” She nodded, happy to have made a practical decision and she got up to get a pen and paper from the car. As she approached, however, the men emerged, and so she walked around the car, checking the tyres and giving the exhaust pipe a cursory glance while they got back in for the final leg of the drive.
“Ready to go?” she asked them, and they nodded.
“How far is it?” one of them asked.
“About four hours,” she replied. “Not long.”
“Did you eat something?” the other man asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
They fell silent, and Amina went back to her lists. Miriam—For and Against. The night was pitch black now, the road lit only by the tunnels of light thrown forward by the headlamps. She drove with one finger on the lamp control, ready to dip the beams should anyone come along the opposite way, but the road she had chosen was not a major route, and other cars were few and far between. She glanced into the mirror at her passengers. One was already asleep, while the other stared out of the side window.
She wanted to begin positively, with her “Reasons For” list, but nothing came immediately to mind. Nothing practical in any event. She knew she had fallen for Miriam much harder than she had ever fallen for anyone and that her days were spent looking forward to the times when she might see her again. But practical considerations eluded her. She moved on the “Reasons Against.” Her mind became suddenly crowded. The most obvious point was that Miriam was a woman, but this consideration had ceased to hold much importance for Amina some time ago. She decided to skip it and move on. “Married” was the word that occurred to her next. This one was less easy to dismiss, as were children (three), Indian, family, scandal and the question of what right did she have to expect someone else to live against the accepted conventions of the whole world?
She stopped making the list, and instead just drove, listening to the sound of the road as it roared along beneath them, blocking all thought and feeling until she heard the unexpected sound of Miriam’s voice. What was most surprising was that it sounded so true and so real in Amina’s head. Over the past week, she had been trying hard to recall every gesture and expression and tone of Miriam’s, and each time the nuances had become more and more elusive to her. And yet here it was, that soft, low voice as real as though she were in the seat next to her.
“My husband has been telling me to learn to drive for ages,” said the voice, softly spoken and yet filled with a new strength, and Amina smiled at the recollection. Those words of Miriam’s had delighted her, and she had had to try very hard not to smile until after she had left the shop that day.
“Come with me,” she remembered herself saying. “Come to Cape Town . . .”
“I have a husband, three children and a shop to look after; I can’t just leave . . .” The abrupt tone of the sentence depressed Amina at once.
She watched the road, swallowed ahead of her by the blackness of the night, and she pressed her foot a little harder on the gas pedal, as though she might somehow be able to catch up to the darkness that always lay just ahead of her, and be covered up by it. She switched on the radio, keeping the volume low, concentrating on listening to the crackling music that it produced. Then she grasped the wheel firmly in both hands and decided to forget about list-making for good, because right at that moment she could not think of any reasons why she should not just do what she had promised herself some time before and forget about Miriam entirely.
Chapter Twenty
Miriam had long since stopped counting days, and was instead counting hours. After much consideration and uncertainty, she had decided that lunchtime on Tuesday should be the hour she should count towards, for Amina knew Omar’s routine by now, and she would surely wait until Tuesday, when he went to Pretoria, to come to give the promised driving lesson.
She awoke in the thin darkness of pre-dawn, and was relieved when edges of daylight became visible beneath the curtains because she had lain awake for some time, not moving, waiting until it should be light enough outside to justify getting up. Downstairs, she went through her usual preparations; she waved to John as he went home after another night watching the shop; she chatted to Robert, then to her children as she helped them wash and dress; she fed the baby, and then Omar, watching him silently as he ate a bowl of porridge.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her. “Why aren’t you eating?”
She looked down at her plate.
“I don’t know. My stomach feels funny,” she said. It was true, but although she would not admit it, even to herself, it was not a case of any illness, but merely a flutter of nervousness that pulsed through her, simultaneously leaving her with an edgy energy. Her children were somehow washed and breakfasted and on their way to school without even noticing the time passing, and Omar also felt a restlessness infecting him from the woman sitting opposite.
“Are you sick?” he asked, before he left.
“I’m fine,” Miriam replied—and she looked fine, her husband noticed with a frown. She smiled as she handed him his jacket, and her eyes seemed to laugh.
“Have a good trip,” she said, and he realised that for a long time now, she had not said those words to him when he left her on a Tuesday. He had been dimly aware that she suspected something about his nights away; probably she even knew the truth. Nothing, however, would ever be articulated between them; even if she should think of speaking about it, he would not allow such a conversation to happen.
His eyes were slightly narrowed as he watched her, and he touched his collar, then checked his tie. It was a gesture she had seen him make a thousand times; he had a particular way of grasping the knot of his tie between his thumb and forefinger. It was a delicate movement—he had a fastidiousness about him when it came to little details that Miriam had always liked. His nails were always kept neatly and squarely cut, and when he put his pen down while doing accounts, he always made sure that it was aligned exactly with the book.
Miriam followed her husband outside
. She knew that he would skip the top step when he walked down to the car; that he would start the engine and straighten the mirror without a glance at her; that he would only look up briefly as he pulled away, because somewhere inside himself he felt bad about going. She knew every detail about his every mannerism, and yet today she felt as though she were watching a stranger. It must be me, she thought to herself; nothing about him has changed.
She waved as he drove slowly away, and watched from the side of her eye as two workers from the Weston farm came walking across the scrubby grass towards the shop. She was pleased they had come, for she sensed that this particular morning would pass even more slowly than all the others that had come before.
As usual, Farah had woken up at four a.m. that morning to see her husband off for his two-day trip to the markets. She would not have bothered to get up at all, were it not for the fact that he moved around so heavily, which made sleeping through his rituals of washing and dressing impossible. He also liked her to rise with him and prepare him some breakfast, which she grudgingly did each week. Anyway, some untrusting part of her liked to watch him drive away in his truck, and to know that he was really gone before his brother arrived later in the day. Today she yawned widely at the window as she watched him leave, and then she turned and went back upstairs where she would sleep for two more hours before rising again to send her children to school, feed her crazy sister-in-law, and get ready for Omar.
By ten o’clock that morning, she had seen to everyone in her household, and was heating water for a bath when she heard the key turn in the lock downstairs. She slipped on a robe, a pale silk garment that Rehmat had left behind, and walked slowly down the stairs, a smile playing on her lips.
“You’re early . . .” she said, and stopped abruptly. Sadru was staring at her, his mouth slightly open.
“You’re very early!” she continued as carelessly as she could. “What happened?” She tied the robe more tightly around herself and watched him from the stairs.
Sadru shook his head and continued to stare. “They . . . they are closed.”
“Closed?”
He nodded.
“The markets?”
Sadru nodded again.
Farah began to get irritable. “Why are they closed?”
“Some demonstration. Day of action by the Blacks.”
“Bloody kaffirs,” noted Farah, and she went back upstairs. She took off the robe and stepped into the bath, her mind racing. There was no way to get hold of Omar. He would have left the shop over two hours ago and would already be here in Pretoria, having meetings with whomever it was he did his weekly business. She considered her predicament for a few minutes, then shrugged and sank as far into the meagre inches of warm water as she could. There was a knock at the bathroom door. Her husband. She had already forgotten him.
“What?” she shouted. There was no reply, and she smiled, knowing he wanted her to invite him in. She heard his feet shuffling outside the door.
“I want some more breakfast,” he said suddenly, his tone petulant.
“Then wait a minute,” she told him, and she closed her eyes and leaned back down in the bath.
At noon, Miriam walked out to the stoep once more and looked at the empty road. She listened and waited. There was the piping of the birds above her, and then the slow rumble of the day’s solitary train. It was a familiar sound to her, the faraway hum of the engine, and she raised her hand to her eyes and looked to the east where she knew the train would appear at any moment.
With a long, distant clatter it ambled past her, along the horizon ahead, and she thought of how she had laughed with Amina to think of her children running out to catch sight of it, and she smiled slightly and raised a hand to wave at it before she went back inside to stir once more at the warm pots of food that sat on the stove.
The café, much to Amina’s dissatisfaction, had been mostly empty all morning. Irritably, she walked up and down the polished floor, watching from the corner of her eye the only occupied table and trying not to think.
“If you’ve got somewhere to go, just go,” Jacob called to her. “I can manage here.”
Amina waved her hand impatiently. “I don’t want to go anywhere,” she said.
Yes, you do, thought Jacob; and he went back to the letter that he was writing. He was not a man who communicated well on paper, his writing style being even less effusive than his speech, but he knew he ought to write to his sisters and his uncle, and besides, he had found that having a newly finished letter provided an excellent reason to visit the post office, where Miss Smith would sell him the required stamps. He never asked for more stamps than he needed, and Miss Smith never offered to sell him a supply, and she had smiled to herself when she had noticed that recently he had begun to send letters almost daily, although he never had a letter to post on the same day that he came to collect the mail. She always sold him his single stamp with great seriousness, however, and never for a moment acknowledged to Jacob that she suspected the reason for his sudden literary turn. She too was pleased to be able to see him and talk with him each day.
The long scratching of a record being roughly placed on the gramophone made Jacob shudder inwardly. He turned to look behind him.
“Sorry,” Amina said.
A tune by Cole Porter came wheezing out, the notes warbling a little until the record settled down. Amina listened for two seconds and then became bored. She went into the kitchen, where she poked around and checked on the cook before emerging again into the café.
“I need to go out,” she announced to Jacob, her tone suddenly rather too casual after the nervous energy of the morning. “Is it okay?”
Jacob looked up, his face impassive. “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” he said.
She picked up her hat and spent a few minutes looking for her keys before she found them already clasped in her hand.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” she called, but this time Jacob did not even look up, only raised a hand in acknowledgement.
Amina felt a sense of release at having chosen some course of action, even if she had not yet convinced herself of her destination. She drove slowly, watching a certain upcoming side street narrowly. With a sudden grasp of the steering wheel, she turned into it and parked. Even from here, she could see Omar’s car outside his brother’s house; he had just arrived. She instinctively shrank down in her seat as she watched him get out of the car, shrugging off his jacket, which he left draped on the back seat. She was too far up the road to be noticed, however, and she watched him loosen his tie and walk quickly up the short pathway before placing his own key in the lock. Amina pushed back a stray curl and looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes looked sad, and her cheekbones were darkly shadowed. She had lost weight in the last couple of weeks.
“You’re a bad man,” she said under her breath, looking again at the door through which Omar had disappeared. “You give me all sorts of ideas about how to spend a Tuesday afternoon.”
For the first time in several days, Amina smiled to herself. Then she ground back the stiff gears and turned the truck around, veering back onto the main road, where she was able to drive at her usual high speed, until she took the small road that was the turn-off for Delhof.
Miriam rocked the baby back and forth and only when she heard the quick, caught breaths of sleep from her child did she allow herself to look again at the clock. It was one-thirty, and she went downstairs to take the food off the stove.
When Omar walked through the door and saw his brother stretched on the couch, half-asleep, he took a step back. He stared at Sadru from the doorway, eyes wide and alert with shock. For the second time that morning, Sadru felt he must surely be dreaming. He had just got over the surprise of coming home to find his wife dressed as though she worked in a brothel. Now he was confronted with the sight of his own brother bursting through the front door in the middle of the day. A dim idea began to rise like curls of smoke in the back of Sadru’s mind, but
before he could formulate anything clearly, he heard Farah’s voice echo stridently from the stairs.
“My God, bhai! Were you just going to surprise us like this? How nice to see you! What made you stop here today? Did you know Sadru was back?”
“No, I didn’t,” replied Omar, truthfully. He avoided Farah’s eyes and grimaced a smile in Sadru’s direction. “I finished early today,” he continued, “so I thought I’d stop and say hello . . .”
Sadru swung his legs down from the couch and rubbed at his eyes sleepily. “I finished early too. Day of action by the Blacks.”
“Ah.” Omar nodded. He walked in and sat down. He felt in control again, and thanked Farah with his usual distant politeness when she brought him a glass of Coke.
“She’ll make some lunch,” said Sadru. “You’ll stay won’t you?”
Omar sipped his drink and considered a moment.
“No, thanks. I should get back to the shop,” he said.
“How is business, bhai? Busy?”
“Not bad,” Omar said.
Sadru sat forward in his chair and listened, attentive to his younger brother. He felt ashamed of the thought that had barely crossed his mind a few moments ago, and as he looked at Omar now, he felt a glow of affection for his well-dressed brother, and resolved always to do his best to make him feel at home in his house.
Chapter Twenty-One
Robert had been put to work cleaning the ironwork of the security gate that closed over the front door every night. The polish was thick and black, and he concentrated hard on his work, so that he would not get the staining substance onto his clothes. He was barely aware, therefore, of the truck that rumbled up the track and passed the shop before stopping about ten yards further up, and he only glanced up when he heard brisk steps walking back towards him. Amina’s eyes were focused beyond him, on the shop, and as he opened his mouth to greet her, she put her finger to her own lips.
