The Book of Other People

by Zadie Smith

  Leaning over, she stretched out her arm and grabbed one of the notebooks by her knees. She must have pressed too far down on her belly, for she snapped her head back, dropped the notebook and began rubbing her stomach.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ she said. She went on rubbing her stomach, closing her eyes, whispering to herself.

  ‘Did you hurt yourself ?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, opening her eyes again. ‘Let me read this to you.’

  She seemed composed, nearly herself again, when she raised one of my father’s notebooks to her face.

  ‘Here, he has some notes about the theft of a cow. Livestock stolen, etc. . . . it said, but in the margin, he wrote, “Lélé born today. We named her Léogâne. Hope she doesn’t think entire town belongs to her.” ’

  Reaching over, she picked up another notebook. ‘ “Lélé first in school,” ’ she read. ‘ “Told me in my ear after dinner that she wants to follow me in work as justice of the peace.” ’

  I wanted to ask her if he had written anything like that, or anything at all, about me, in case I had missed it, hadn’t seen it. But I knew he hadn’t. And she did too.

  ‘You could have been,’ I told her. ‘We both could have done the job.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘thirty years ago, you couldn’t bring a little girl around with you documenting the ills of the town. Both he and Maman told me as much.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, trying to cheer her up, ‘they gave you their whole world, which was this town. They gave you its name. They were very proud the day of your marriage. They loved Gaspard. They were sad that you couldn’t have children. They’d be so happy now.’

  She turned the notebook pages, closing them all. I thought she was going to raise the mosquito net and crawl out, but she didn’t.

  ‘Speaking of Gaspard,’ I said.

  ‘You want to know when I’m going back?’

  I felt like I was talking to one of the people who came to file their complaints. I needed specific locations, dates, and times.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I am thinking of selling the house.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not the house.’

  ‘It’s starting to seem foolish to live here so close to the river,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to feel like it’s a death trap.’

  I wanted to climb in there with her and tell her that everything was going to be okay, that it was all right now for us to try to forge our own paths, to move away from the past. Instead she gathered the notebooks in a pile and slid towards the edge of the bed away from them. She raised the mosquito net so fast that in an instant our faces were nearly touching. I was so unprepared for it that I had to slide the chair back a bit.

  ‘You want to know why I left Gaspard?’ she said. ‘It’s because of the baby.’

  ‘What about the baby?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s sick,’ she said.

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘Is that how you remember all the things people say to you?’ she asked. ‘Do you simply repeat what they say?’

  ‘What do you mean the baby’s sick?’ I asked.

  Just then, Marthe walked in, announcing lunch. ‘Lélé, you haven’t eaten all day,’ she said, wagging a scolding index finger. ‘You have to eat to keep that baby strong.’

  ‘We’ll be down soon, chérie,’ Lélé said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Marthe, ‘but we’re not going to let the food get cold. You know how much I hate cold food.’

  ‘Do you realize how long she’s been telling us that?’ Lélé said when Marthe left the room.

  ‘Probably our whole lives,’ I said.

  ‘Do you realize how astonishing that is?’

  ‘Tell me about the baby,’ I pressed.

  ‘I didn’t want to do it,’ she said, ‘but Gaspard insisted because of my age, so we went to the hospital, L’Hôpital Sainte Croix, and had it done.’

  I’m not sure I grasped everything she said. There was a test with pictures, an ultrasound. The baby, determined to be a girl, had a large cyst growing from the back of her neck, down her entire spine. If she lived long enough to be born, she would probably die soon after.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What caused that?’

  ‘A stroke of bad luck,’ she said. ‘No one knows.’

  Both the doctor and Gaspard thought she should abort while she still could. She wanted to see the whole thing through, to carry full term.

  ‘This is your beheading,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll do what I can to help,’ I said.

  ‘There’s nothing to do,’ she said. ‘That’s the point.’

  ‘Have you thought about the birth?’ I asked.

  ‘Marthe will do it,’ she said. ‘Marthe will deliver her here, just like she did us.’

  That night after dinner, it was too hot to stay inside and we sat out on the verandah again, listening to sounds we had neglected on other evenings: the wailing of cicadas, the crowing of disoriented cocks, the hushed laughter of distant neighbors cutting through our property. Unlike the summers of our childhood, when, in spite of the heat, we would have been running around half dressed, we heard no stirring in the trees around us, no birds settling in for the night. And we heard no croaking frogs splashing in and out of the river. We heard no frogs at all.

  Already, my sister’s baby felt like an absence too, something we should grieve while ignoring. Every now and then, I would see her twist her body from side to side. Then she would rise up momentarily from her chair as the baby roused inside her for what seemed to me like a series of first times. Looking down at the gentle crescent curve of her body, she did not touch her stomach, nor did she invite me to touch it or lower my ear to it. And I did not dare ask.

  Gaspard came by the house again early the next morning. It was a shockingly beautiful morning. Not yet sultry or overcast, but intensely bright, almost dazzling. It was the type of morning that evaporated all my other fears about living in a river’s path, the type of morning that would probably keep me in Léogâne forever, planting my vetiver and almond trees.

  I was leaving for work when I saw Gaspard sitting in his car, his front wheels facing Lélé’s terrace. I tapped on the window, and he reached over and opened the door for me. Sliding into the passenger seat, I gave his shoulder the type of light squeeze he liked to give mine, as a greeting, an apology. Sitting there quietly, we took turns looking down at the gravel pathway leading through the almond trees towards the open road. When we were children, Lélé and I had often raced each other from the house to the road. Our dash had always seemed endless, exhausting, but we were extremely proud of ourselves when we made it to the end, either in front of or behind the other. Looking up at Lélé’s terrace where she sat every morning wrapped in a blanket watching the sun rise, Gaspard and I saw only her feet peeking out over the edge, encased in the lace-shaped clerestory trim.

  ‘I’m not going to leave her,’ he said. ‘After the baby’s born, we’ll see where we can go.’

  He raised his hands as if to wave in Lélé’s direction, but she was looking past us, towards the mountains, framed by a halo of indigo sky.

  ‘She wants to bury the child here,’ he said. ‘She wants it to have spent its whole life here in your parents’ house. I suppose she feels that if she’d never left, none of this would have happened. She’d be here like you, alone, but safe from the things you document so well.’

  ‘It’s still questionable how well I do with the documenting,’ I said.

  ‘She admires you,’ he said, ‘and she thinks you do well.’

  When I said nothing else, he added, ‘Among the trees. She wants to bury the child among the almond trees.’

  Just then I noticed that he was not speaking to me at all. He was speaking to Lélé. She had turned her gaze away from the mountains and was looking straight at him, at us, her gaze unwavering, almost like a challenge, a d
are.

  ‘It’s a fungus,’ Gaspard said.

  ‘I thought you didn’t know what caused it,’ I said.

  ‘Not the baby,’ he said, ‘the frogs.’

  The day before, when he’d been visiting with Lélé, she had told him to try to find out for her what could have killed the river frogs. He’d gone back home and telephoned several people including one of his childhood friends, a Haitian-Canadian botanist who had told Gaspard that, given the descriptions and circumstances, he could only imagine that the frogs had probably died from a fungal disease that’s caused by the hotter than usual weather.

  ‘Is there anything we could have done for them?’ Gaspard had asked his friend.

  ‘No,’ the friend had said. ‘We all have our paths to tread and this was theirs.’

  The Liar

  Aleksandar Hemon

  The crowd is whirring in a cloud of brazen afternoon dust; they have waited too long already. Finally, the Procurator steps down to the penultimate stair, spreads his feet and installs his arms akimbo to assume a routine pose of authority. His impressively rotund belly is outlined under the sweaty toga, the shadow of the navel at its center. He scans the crowd with contempt, the eye of the navel following his gaze as he turns a little to the left, a little to the right. The din dies down. With their swords, the soldiers push forward two tattered men - the men’s shackles rattle as they totter - and position them on each side of the Procurator, who doesn’t even glance at them. It all looks like a well-rehearsed performance.

  ‘People!’ the Procurator shouts. ‘People! Look at me!’

  The crowd has been looking at him all along, but now it tightens, as if each man were a blood vessel and the air has just become colder. The dust is slowly settling down, coating their bodies, biting their eyes.

  ‘These two caitiffs here have violated the laws of the Empire,’ the Procurator thunders. ‘They ought to be punished with the utmost severity. But they are just men and the Empire is merciful - one of them shall live.’

  The crowd rumbles with excitement. The Procurator points at the man on the right: he is scrawny, with long, narrow arms and broken teeth, his left eye turgid with blood and pus. ‘This man is a thief,’ the Procurator says. ‘He has robbed men of their sustenance. He has sneaked up on them at night. He has stolen their meager property. Fathers have become destitute, mothers have wept, because of this scoundrel.’

  The thief looks at the crowd with as much innocence in his right eye as he can muster. The crowd knows his ilk, they recognize his sinewy greed, but they can also see the bruises on his forearms; they can see the crusty gullies of blood stretching from his nostrils along the curly curve of his mustache to disappear in his beard.

  ‘People,’ cries the thief with a cracked, screeching voice. ‘I was hungry, my children were hungry. I was hungry!’

  A soldier smacks the thief across the face with the back of his hand and a fresh spring of blood sprinkles the thief ’s beard. The crowd mutters, excited by blood promising more blood.

  ‘This one,’ - the Procurator points at the man on the left - ‘this one is a mountebank, a liar. He has uttered many a humbug. He has spread calumnies, lies, false stories, besmirching honest men and the Empire. For him, nothing is sacred. He has transgressed against the truth, my friends, not just the Empire - the truth. And the truth is the mother of law and order.’

  The crowd turns its attention to the man on the left: his hands are tied behind his back; his shoulder blades are sticking out like fins; his kneecaps are as bare as baby skulls; his flocculent beard is sagging with sweat, as if he were shriveling - but he has no bruises, other than the shackle blisters on his ankles. He confessed to the guards whatever they wanted to hear, and then told them what they didn’t ask for, freely embellishing so as to make them agreeable - they just listened, shaking their heads in disbelief, yet unable to stop listening or beat him. The liar looks back at the crowd innocuously: there are the bloodthirsty, law-loving brutes, ever picking their asses in the first row; and there are the handy pick-pockets pilfering their pockets; and over there, safely on the flanks, the citizens of good standing, disgusted and scared by the spectacle, shouting down a drunkard whining about his unfaithful wives. He recognizes the children with pockmarked faces and tawny teeth, who scuttled after him and pulled his donkey’s tail not so long ago; and there is the drunk harlot with her green eyes filling up with tears, as though he were her husband. He spots the spies watching the crowd from within the crowd, pricking up their ears for a nefarious word about the Procurator or the Empire.

  He knows he should be calm and dignified and serene. He knows he could turn the crowd and make it love him - he has done it before. He could just look them straight in the eye, lock the harlot’s gaze, or touch the hairy brute, and tell them one of the tales he picked up roaming the land, or a parable Joseph told him, or the story he dreamt up last night. But the Procurator would never let him speak; and, even if he did, the crowd desired blood, not words. A strange panic possesses him, as if his whole being sneezed - a painful, shattering, humiliating desire to live and breathe in this body, now and forever. So he begins twitching his head to the right, throwing his glance at the thief like a tether, saying with his body, because his suffocating voice would not do it, saying: ‘Take him! Take him!’

  The crowd is bedeviled by a sudden change in the liar’s demeanor. His face is madly taut; his neck keeps cramping; his eyes are bulging out sideways, as if trying to sneak out of the sockets. They see now that the liar is not just a liar, but that he is overtaken by evil spirits; they can see he is a bad seed. The thief does nothing, conscious that something good for him is beginning to happen.

  ‘Let the thief go,’ they shout. ‘Let him go.’

  ‘Let him go,’ the Procurator orders the soldiers.

  The liar drops his head to his chest, as if all the neck tendons suddenly snapped, and closes his eyes. The crowd stands in silence for a moment, enjoying the moment of his recognition, but then they start fidgeting and shuffling their feet, and the dust is aroused again, darker this time, as the sun has begun to set.

  And the soldiers load a huge wooden cross on the liar’s back - a handful of splinters immediately pierces the skin on his right shoulder, releasing lush blood streams. He drags the cross through narrow streets teeming with people, wiping the sweat off their faces, waiting for him to drop and die. But he keeps on going, and in a hallucinatory moment sees the thief ’s tranquil face in the crowd, as if what has just happened never happened.

  The cross slips from his shoulder, scraping off a large swath of skin. The soldier marching next to him lifts the cross and loads it back on, but puts it down on his left shoulder, slowly. ‘There,’ the soldier says. The liar is panting, nearly oblivious to the pain, but still manages to utter a grateful world to the soldier. The crowd thickens around them, so the soldiers have to spread it, beating it back with spears and the flat sides of their swords.

  ‘This does not bode well,’ says the liar to the soldier.

  The soldier says nothing.

  ‘You know,’ the liar says and coughs up a flock of blood drops, ‘I am the son of God.’

  The soldier says nothing.

  ‘I am,’ the liar says. ‘I have been told.’

  ‘Verily you are,’ says the soldier. ‘And I am Virgil.’

  And the procession moves on, up the hill, on top of which most of the crowd is already waiting. The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth.

  Jordan Wellington Lint

  Chris Ware

  Magda Mandela

  Hari Kunzru

  It is 4.30 am and Magda would like us, her neighbours, to know that she is a very talented woman, a woman of accomplishments. Magda is a nurse, a qualified pilot, a businesswoman and philanthropist, a gifted and sensitive lover, the holder of certificates in computing and English grammar, a semi-professional country singer and a mother. Yes, a mother! Magda has a daug
hter. Who came out of this pussy right here.

  Right here, she says. Out of this pussy. RIGHT HERE. And all along the street we come to our windows to twitch the net curtains and face the awe-inspiring truth that is Magda in her lime-green thong. She’s standing on the top step, the lights of the house blazing behind her, a terrifying mash-up of the Venus of Willendorf and a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, making gestures with a beer can at the little knot of emergency service personnel gathered on the pavement below.

  One of the younger and less experienced constables has obviously asked her to accompany him to a place where, as an agent of the state, he will feel less exposed. A police station, perhaps. Or a hospital. Anywhere that will tip the odds a little in his favour. Magda has met this suggestion with the scorn it deserves. She knows she outnumbers these fools. YOU KNOW ME, she says. Then, with a sinister leer, AND I KNOW YOU.

  Being known by Magda is a messy and unavoidably carnal experience. All of us neighbours are known by Magda. Last time she knew me, she pushed me up against the side of my car. I know you, she breathed huskily. I knew I’d been known.

  In their big reflective jackets, the policemen appear crumpled and insubstantial. They are visibly trying to block out the knowledge of her knowledge, no doubt using mental techniques they were taught at the training school: I am a powerful person. I control my own destiny. Behind the ambulance, one of the paramedics is taking a quick nip of oxygen.

  They don’t realize what they’re up against. Magda is the daughter of Nelson Mandela, major world leader and saviour of his country. Don’t these Day-Glo fools see the resemblance? It’s staring them in the face. If they have any doubts, ANY DOUBTS AT ALL, she tells them, they have only to consult the autobiography Long Road to Freedom. Read the autobiography! Read page 37 and page 475! They will see. THEN THEY WILL KNOW.

  Magda is coated in something that I suspect is coconut oil. She has the air of a woman who has roused herself from titanic erotic exertions to be here with us on Westerbury Road tonight. She has been INTERRUPTED. She has THINGS TO DO. There’s no sign of Errol. I hope he’s all right. Errol is quite fragile.