Speechless

by Anne Simpson

  Tonight I talked to Charles, she said. You know, the one I’ve been working for.

  He put down his book.

  I said I wanted to do the story on A’isha. He said I was worlds apart from her.

  You are worlds apart.

  Sophie propped herself up on her elbow.

  Does that mean that it’s impossible? Is that what Charles meant?

  It’s harder, but not impossible. Don’t hold it against him.

  It just feels as though there are things I’m not allowed to do.

  Later, she could hear him brushing his teeth, flushing the toilet. When he came to bed, he lay on his side facing away from her and fell asleep quickly.

  She wanted to talk; she wanted to ask him things. She reached over and let her hand hover just above his arm, but she couldn’t bring herself to wake him. How could she be so direct and impetuous in some things and so fearful in others?

  SHE ROLLED OVER in bed, waking. It was already light. When she groped for her phone, she saw it was later than she thought; Felix would be gone. She glanced at the face of the phone again and groaned. There was a voice mail. She wanted to sleep.

  The voice mail was from Charles Oluwasegun. Please give me a ring this morning, he said.

  She sat up. Give me a ring. Charles Oluwasegun had never called her; it had always been an underling of his who had asked her to meet with him at a specific time at his office, never the man himself. Perhaps he hadn’t liked her assertiveness in asking for the A’isha Nasir story — no, it was not merely a story, as he’d said.

  She got up and showered, went into the kitchen where Felix had made coffee, opened the fridge, and reached for the half mango left on a plate. The cold, sweet juice of the mango slipped down her throat, and she stopped in the middle of the kitchen, eyes closed. Nothing else tasted quite like mango. The sweet slickness of it, as if she were eating sunlight. She leaned against the door frame, collecting herself before going back into the bedroom and picking up the phone.

  Mr. Oluwasegun? she said.

  No, it wasn’t Mr. Oluwasegun. It was his assistant, the woman with the array of coloured hair clips fanned around her forehead.

  Who is calling, please?

  Sophie MacNeil.

  One moment, please.

  Thank you. Sophie twisted a curly strand of hair, trying to recall the woman’s name.

  Sophie? said Charles.

  Yes.

  Maryam Maidoya is not going to do the piece on A’isha Nasir. I wanted to let you know, since you showed interest. Are you still keen?

  Yes, of course, yes.

  I must also say that Maryam pointed out that she thought the subject was a touchy one. She comes from Niger State herself. The situation there has been tense, especially between Christians and Muslims.

  I’m still very keen to do it.

  Are you sure?

  Yes.

  You must respect her by doing your work well. In other words, don’t flatter yourself.

  Yes, sir.

  Good. That’s settled then. You’ll go there before the weekend.

  6

  ___

  A’ISHA SAW THE VISITORS ARRIVE; a small, speedy car turned around and around in what seemed to be two loops, an unfinished figure eight, and stopped. A cranking of the emergency brake, and then the driver got out, a man she’d known when he’d been a boy, Ahmed, and a younger boy, and a woman. Ahmed was lean and full of confidence, with a loose-fitting shirt, jeans that fit his legs like skin, and leather shoes that looked expensive. She had heard that Ahmed had gone to Italy, and that he was studying there. Italy. The younger boy had no such confidence, and he half-hid behind Ahmed. And the woman, who was not tall, seemed inexpertly but compactly pressed together. Her wrapper and blouse were made of the same fabric, printed with every colour of the rainbow. She had a flattened face, all the flatter because of the hijab that framed it; she turned and looked quizzically at A’isha. It was Rahel.

  On the other side of the compound, A’isha helped her mother over the threshold. Nafisa leaned against the frame of the door weakly, and, once inside, it was with difficulty that she lowered herself to her mat on the floor.

  Aghhhhh, she breathed, the slightest moan, as if the wind had gone through her.

  Rahel had been A’isha’s neighbour when she was married. It was this woman who had come to her once; it seemed as though it was many years ago, though less than a year had passed. She had come with bean cakes, evenly fried, and A’isha and Rahel ate them together. A’isha was wondering whether she should stay in the house when all of her husband’s family was trying to ensure that she left. The women of the family had been bullying her to get her out of the house, property that was hers by rights. The morning of the bean cakes, the family had settled on something new, and that something was Musa.

  He caught her by surprise; the basin of warm water was pushed out of her grasp. The basin clattered, spilling the water, and she fell with Musa on top of her. He tore at her clothing and shoved himself between her legs, though she beat him with her one free arm. She wasn’t strong enough to throw him off. He was already inside her. Hard, hard, hard — he hurt her with each thrust, so she shrieked, and he clamped his hand on her mouth. The liquid warmth from the basin slid under her body, a dampness under her shoulders and arms, her hips and legs, and she lay in that puddle after he left, thinking about what she’d have done if it had been a knife she held.

  She lay looking up, at the underside of the corrugated tin roof that extended over the porch, listening to the sounds in the road: a motorcycle zooming past, someone yelling in a voice that whooped up, someone banging a hammer against metal. This was how it was, she thought. Why didn’t she get up? She didn’t care. But her dampened clothing grew cold, and she shivered, and then she knew she should get up. She would heat the water again, since the electricity was still on; she would heat the water and clean herself and then she could lie down inside. She thought of Musa, and how he would find her there, and determined that she would keep the door locked against him.

  A’isha had cleaned herself by the time Rahel came with the bean cakes, but the shame had been the kind that did not allow A’isha to raise her eyes to Rahel’s face, except briefly, as she was leaving.

  A’ISHA FELT NAFISA’S HAND ON HERS. She came back to herself. There was Safiya, lying on her sleeping mat near Nafisa, having kicked off the brightly coloured piece of cotton that covered her. Her sweet, curled-up body, ripe as fruit. One part of A’isha was slipped inside this child, one part of herself was slipped inside her mother. Nafisa had given in to the luxury of sleep, and A’isha saw how her limbs, which had been knotted in pain, were relaxed. It was warm, too warm to do much of anything; it soothed A’isha just as it had soothed Nafisa, and she lay down beside Safiya. Just a few minutes, she thought lazily, just a few.

  Nafisa snored, and this kept A’isha from falling asleep, a roll of sound, grinding and throaty, and then it diminished, water taking stones down a track. The sound comforted A’isha. Sometimes she woke in the dark and heard it and went back to sleep: the deep, guttural inhaling from the centre of her mother’s chest, the loose exhaling.

  AFTER THE BEAN CAKES, when Rahel was leaving, she said, That boy did something.

  A’isha couldn’t bear Rahel’s large, downturned eyes fixed on her.

  You think this was the first time for him? said Rahel.

  A’isha and Rahel stood on the porch, nearly at the place where Musa had knocked the basin out of A’isha’s grasp, made her fall. Five steps away, maybe four. A’isha could see through the openwork of breeze blocks at the top of the wall that Rahel had put clothes out to dry on the bushes of the compound that adjoined hers, draping them the way A’isha’s own mother had done when A’isha was a child. The sheets, pink, were looped across her line of vision on the other side of the wall. Rahel must have done the washing that morning. She must have heard what Musa did to A’isha.

  I will tell someone and he will beat Musa, said Ra
hel. Teach him not to do such things. My brother —

  A’isha shook her head.

  She thought it might be impossible to eat another bean cake, the succulent bean cakes that this woman had made with such kindness. Rahel had heard A’isha cry out. How much had Rahel heard before Musa put his hand over A’isha’s mouth, his hand smelling of grease from fixing bicycles?

  He will come back, Rahel said. She sighed and took her pan, feet slapping in her shoes. She was right about that.

  A’ISHA COULDN’T NAP WITH SAFIYA. She got up and went outside, close to the hut, where she would hear her mother if she called. The visitors might still be there, and they were, taking cool drinks in the shade with A’isha’s auntie and uncle. Ahmed was laughing about something, leaning back. He’d always had a smooth face, and he could contort it into grimaces, fold his lips under his nose and pull his eyes back to make himself look entirely different, as if he’d pulled himself inside out. It could be hard to remember that he was very smart when he could be such a comic. He was like his mother in the way he kept his intelligence hidden.

  It rained in quick torrents, but A’isha was protected on the bench under the thatched roof. They had not come before. Why were they there? To ask A’isha’s uncle to pay the boy’s school fees? But surely Ahmed, with his fancy shoes, surely he could help with school fees? Rahel stood up from the gathering. She was thanking them; soon they would leave and A’isha didn’t want them to leave. She wanted them to remain in their chairs around the table so she could watch them. Rahel’s boys didn’t move, though the youngest was jumpy, not wanting to be with adults.

  Rahel motioned for him to stay where he was, put up her umbrella, and made her way in the direction of A’isha, with an unhurried gait, as if she hardly cared about greeting A’isha, but was doing it because she knew she ought to. Halfway across the compound she paused to put down the umbrella, since the rain had passed over. She tightened the knot of the wrapper at her waist; the yellow and orange and red and green and purple made her a gorgeous butterfly, but her blunt, homely face was at odds with the rest of her. She was taking her time.

  They greeted each other, and Rahel wiped her brow with a white handkerchief extracted from some secret place in her blouse before sitting down carefully on the bench beside A’isha.

  You are well, A’isha?

  Rahel looked in front of her as she spoke, not at A’isha, as if they were in a car, side by side.

  I am well.

  Your mother? asked Rahel.

  She has been ill. Her colon is making her unwell.

  I am sorry-o.

  And your family, said A’isha. All are well?

  Rahel made a sound of assent. Your child?

  A’isha nodded.

  I am sorry for all that has happened, said Rahel. I am sorry for you. My brother could have done something.

  No.

  Rahel clutched and unclutched the white handkerchief.

  Musa is there, in that house. The house where you lived with your husband. Musa has taken a wife.

  A’isha knew Rahel didn’t expect her to speak.

  Rahel jerked her head toward the group. Those are my sons.

  They are fine.

  Yes, they are. Ahmed has no wife, but he has need of one. Rahel laughed, a laugh that cascaded out of her throat. Today Kojo needs help with a scholarship, and so — She spread her hands and laughed again. We come begging for the elders to help him. Your uncle is a good man; he has helped many.

  Yes, sighed A’isha. Her uncle barely acknowledged A’isha’s presence, let alone Safiya.

  Rahel mopped her brow. The sun had come out and it was oven hot where they sat against the wall of the hut. No birds moved or sang, and there wasn’t even a breath of wind to lift the leaves of the trees.

  He came again to you. Musa. Didn’t he?

  A’isha had closed her eyes. She opened them. Yes.

  He waylaid you.

  Even Rahel, who was forthright, would not say what Musa had done.

  I did not know when he would come.

  Every day?

  He thought I was his property; he thought the house was the property of his family. He made use of me. And he knew what I would do.

  Mmmnn.

  He knew I would give in, and I did. Maybe he knew I’d get pregnant. I thought I could be stronger than Musa.

  You are.

  A’isha laughed, a brief laugh. He got what he wanted. He wants no part of Safiya, no, but he has the house and now he has a wife.

  You will see, said Rahel, stuffing the white handkerchief into her blouse. A tip of white stuck out, a feather tip.

  What will I see?

  You are stronger. Rahel stood up.

  A’isha shook her head.

  There will be an appeal? asked Rahel.

  Yes, they tell me so, but I do not know who will represent me, or when it will happen. The head man has told my uncle there will be a lawyer for me.

  He will help you, certainly. Alhaji Hassan.

  Rahel adjusted her hijab, as colourful as the rest of her attire. There were wet half circles under her sleeves as she raised her arms. You must tell them.

  Of Musa? A’isha’s voice was hard. Musa? I told them only that he was the father. I will not say that I thought of ways to cripple his good leg, that I imagined stabbing his chest right through to his heart. I thought of carrying the kitchen knife around with me, but Musa would have used it against me. I will not tell them what he did to me. It is like the knife. It would be used to cut me.

  Rahel readied herself to endure the baking heat of the compound, which lay in the full flare of sunlight. The puddles glistened. Then I will tell them, she said.

  No. A’isha stood up. You have a good name, as does your husband. Your sons, you must think of them. It will come back to your family, as this disgrace has come to my family. You must not speak of it. It will be your word against Musa’s.

  She took up her umbrella. But it is not right.

  Musa will have his punishment. At some time, he will have his punishment.

  Rahel turned quickly to A’isha as if she had a sharp rejoinder, but she stopped herself and didn’t speak.

  7

  ___

  SOPHIE HELD HER HAND HARD and flat against her mouth because of the sweetish, rank smell. It wasn’t A’isha’s mother Sophie had come to see, but A’isha had asked Sophie to greet her mother, to come into her mother’s hut, the last one by the cashew tree, and Sophie went with her, wishing selfishly that she could take something to defend herself, anything at all: one leaf among the densely crowded leaves of the cashew tree, a curled flower newly fallen on the swept earth, the vivid pink of a child’s head scarf as she hooted and broke free from the grasp of another child, sprinting away.

  Sophie entered the slow twist of warm honey, morning into afternoon, but there was the car that had brought them from Lagos that morning, and there was Felix, talking to one of A’isha’s uncles, and there was A’isha, holding back the frayed curtain at the door of the hut, through which Sophie went, pausing on the threshold to close her eyes and slide into a darkness pricked with claw-sharp points, trying to escape the stench, the inescapable stench.

  She swayed for a moment at the door and when she opened her eyes it took a few moments before she could make out what lay before her. A woman’s body, a bundle of rags, a body. A’isha knelt and Sophie followed her lead, composing herself and trying to focus on the uneven floor under her knees. But she could also make out the woman’s eyes, their shine, as they shifted from A’isha to Sophie and back to A’isha, eyes that burned under the shelf of her brow.

  My mother, Nafisa, A’isha said softly. Very sick, but not — She hopped her fingers through the air.

  She meant contagious, Sophie thought.

  Hello, Nafisa, said Sophie.

  The woman didn’t reply, or maybe she spoke and Sophie didn’t hear it.

  Nafisa, Nafisa, that was it. Sophie clung to the name, as if it would help her.r />
  A’isha took a sponge and dipped it in a cup of water. She put it to her mother’s lips, dampening them.

  Sophie wasn’t prepared for a woman lying on a dirt floor. It wasn’t simply a dirt floor, though: now she could see how it had been dug out so that there was a space beneath Nafisa’s body, where several mats had been placed. And there was a pan beneath her wasted body, but Sophie didn’t see the pan until A’isha took it away and dumped it outside the hut, and came back in, wiping it with a rag and holding up her mother’s legs to slip it under her body again, as if she were diapering a baby. It was done quickly, expertly, so as not to draw notice.

  Sophie pressed her hands hard against her thighs, dug her fingernails through the fabric into the skin, willing herself not to move, not to get up and run. Down her back, under her cotton top, ran tributaries of sweat, rivers of sweat.

  A’isha knotted the curtain loosely, and then the light came through the door, falling on her as she came close and knelt by her mother again. The stripe of yellow gold divided Nafisa’s body into light and shadow. Except for the light — animated, vital — everything within the hut spoke of decay: the curtain, knotted so it looked like a bedraggled moth wing, the yellow and red and orange patterned cloth that lay over the body of the skeletal woman, revealing only her head and her narrow feet with their ridged toenails. Sophie put her hand over her nose and mouth again, wanting to gag. No, she would not. She placed both hands firmly against her thighs as if to keep them from straying. Instantly she wanted to vomit again; she could taste it, and it was all she could do to force herself not to turn her head and throw up in the corner.

  The mother and daughter were speaking in low tones, and now, with the light coming in, Sophie concentrated on the mother’s face, her hooded eyes and exposed teeth. Nafisa’s skull was nearly visible under the taut layer of skin. A’isha gestured to Sophie and talked about her. She must have said that Sophie was doing an article about A’isha for The Daily Leader, that she’d arrived with someone who would record what they said, and that this woman, Sophie, had come to Nigeria all the way from Canada. Maybe A’isha was saying these things and maybe she wasn’t, but Nafisa’s eyes travelled over Sophie’s face, her wild, curly hair, her foreignness, as if uncovering everything that Sophie didn’t want to tell.