She couldn’t face seeing Kamal, though she knew he would be waiting. Without really knowing why, she found herself walking to the little church her father had loved—and shivered as she realized she had begun to think of him in the past tense. She corrected herself. He was still alive.
She never prayed, but she felt the need to collect her thoughts. The chapel was deserted at this time of day. The quiet interior felt detached from the world; or perhaps the still, silent space lay at the heart of everything. Was it the cool air, the faint smell of incense, the ring of her footsteps on the stone floor? Giulia held her breath. Since childhood, she had always felt a sense of awe when she stepped into a church, as if she were stepping into a place of mystery, crowded with the souls of centuries past. There were always a few lighted candles. She wondered who found the time to tend the tiny, ephemeral flames amid the hustle and bustle of the world outside. She slipped a coin into the collection box, took a candle, and placed it in a holder next to the others. She lit it and closed her eyes. She began to pray, in a low voice. She begged heaven to save her father, to give her the strength to accept a life she had not chosen. The Lanfredis’ redemption came at a heavy price, she thought to herself.
Only a miracle would get them out of this mess.
But there were no such things as miracles in this life. Giulia knew that. There were miracles in the Bible, and in the stories that she had read as a child. She had stopped believing in fairy tales. Her father’s accident had propelled her into adult life, and she was completely unprepared. She longed to bask in the gentle warmth of late adolescence, like a delicious, long bath you don’t want to end. But time raced on, maturity had come, and it was cruel indeed. The dream was over.
Marriage was the only solution. Giulia turned the question over and over in her mind. Gino would take over the loan secured against the house. The workshop was doomed, but her family would be safe, at least. As her mother said, it was what Papà would have wanted. And Giulia couldn’t argue with that. Her mind was made up.
She wrote to Kamal that same evening. The words would be less cruel on paper, she thought. In her letter, she explained about the workshop, about the threat hanging over the family. She told him she would be getting married.
They had promised one another nothing, after all. She had never pictured a future with Kamal, never imagined their love would last. They didn’t share the same culture, or the same god, or the same traditions. And yet their skin was a flawless match. Kamal’s body fitted hers so perfectly. With him, Giulia felt more alive than at any other time in her life. She was disturbed by the violent desire that gripped her and kept her awake at night, that drove her trembling from her bed every morning. The feelings that took her back to him each day. This man she had only just met, and knew nothing about, or very little, had touched her more deeply than anyone before.
This isn’t love, she thought, trying to persuade herself. It was something else. Something she had to let go.
She didn’t even know where to send the letter. She had no idea where he lived. He told her once that he shared a room with another worker, somewhere on the outskirts of town. It didn’t matter. Giulia would leave the letter in the cave where they always met. She would put it under a seashell next to the rock where they had embraced so many times.
Their story would end there, she told herself, as if by accident, the same way it had started.
She did not sleep that night. Sleep had deserted her the moment she discovered what lay in her father’s desk drawer. She would watch as the hours passed, one by one. Sleepless, anxious nights, as if day would never break. She had lost even the strength to read, and lay still, like a stone, a prisoner of the dark.
She would have to announce the closure of the workshop to the women. She knew it was up to her; she couldn’t count on her sisters, or her mother. The women who were more than her coworkers—her friends, she would have to send them away. There would be nothing to soften the blow, nothing to share except bitter tears. She knew what the workshop meant to each one of them. Some had spent their whole lives there. What would become of La Nonna? Who would hire her now? Alessia, Gina, Alda—they were all over fifty, a critical age on today’s job market. What of Agnese, who was alone with her children now that her husband had left her?
And Federica, whose parents were no longer there to help her? Giulia had tried to put off the moment she dreaded, like a painful operation. But face it she must. Tomorrow I will talk to them, she told herself. And the thought of it destroyed her and kept her awake.
It happened at around two o’clock in the morning: a stone thrown up at her window in the dead of night. Giulia was startled out of the torpor into which she had finally sunk. A second strike rang out. She peered through the glass: Kamal was on the street down below. He lifted his eyes to hers. He held the letter in his hand and called out:
Giulia! Come down!
We need to talk!
Giulia signaled to him to keep quiet. She was afraid her mother would wake up, or the neighbors—they were all light sleepers. But Kamal stood his ground. He insisted. He had to talk to her. Giulia gave in. Hurriedly, she dressed, ran downstairs, and joined him in the street.
You’re mad, she told him.
You’re mad to come here.
And that was when the miracle occurred.
Sarah
Montreal, Canada
It started slowly, insidiously. First, a meeting at which someone had forgotten to include her. We didn’t want to bother you, the partner told her later.
Then a case that no one had mentioned to her. You’ve got enough on your plate at the moment. Phrases calculated to show they cared. They were almost believable. Sarah didn’t want special treatment, she wanted to carry on working, to be counted, like before. She wanted no one to make allowances. But she had sensed for some time that she was being involved less and less in the life of the firm, in the decisions to be taken, the management of the caseload. There were things people forgot to tell her, questions people would ask of someone else.
Since her illness had been made public, Curst had risen in the firm. Sarah saw him talking to Johnson far more often, laughing at his jokes, going out with him to lunch. Meanwhile, Inès was showing more initiative and taking greater liberties with the cases she handled, without consulting Sarah. When she called Inès to order, the junior would explain with a falsely apologetic air that Sarah hadn’t been there, or had been unavailable—in other words, she had been at the hospital. Inès took advantage of Sarah’s absences to make decisions and intervene at meetings in her place. She had become much closer to Curst lately and had even taken up smoking, solely—Sarah thought—in order to share cigarette breaks with her mentor. A chance of promotion . . . you never knew.
At the hospital, Sarah began her treatment. Ignoring the oncologist’s advice, she refused to take days off work. If she was absent, if she abandoned her post, she left an empty space—it was too risky. She must hold on, every step of the way. She found the strength to get up every morning and make it in to work. She would not let the cancer rob her of the thing she had built up over so many years. She would fight tooth and nail to keep her empire. That thought alone kept her on her feet, gave her the strength, the guts, the energy she needed.
But the oncologist had warned her—the treatment would be hard going, and the side effects even worse. He had given her an exhaustive list, in a spreadsheet, detailing the precise moment when she would feel nauseous, what would happen to her hair, her nails, her eyebrows, her skin, her hands, her feet. What lay in store, day after day, during the months of her treatment. Sarah had left his consulting room with a stack of prescriptions to counter everything on the list.
What he hadn’t told her, what no one had mentioned, was the side effect that was more unpleasant than even the sore, swollen hands and feet, worse than the nausea or the fog that sometimes shrouded her brain. The side effect that she had been unprepared for, from which no prescription could offer relief: the isol
ation that went hand in hand with the disease itself, the slow, painful setting-aside that she was now experiencing.
At first, Sarah didn’t want to put a name to what was happening at work. She preferred to ignore the things her colleagues had “forgotten,” the new indifference in Johnson’s eyes. Not indifference, exactly, that was the wrong word, but a kind of distance, a curious cooling of their relations.
It took several weeks of appointments to which she had not been called, meetings to which she had not been invited, cases that had not been passed to her, before she was convinced: she was being pushed out.
The cruel, painful process had a name that she found it hard to contemplate: discrimination. A term she had heard in court a hundred times but which had never before applied to her. Yet she knew the definition of it by heart:
Discrimination may be described as a distinction, whether intentional or not but based on grounds relating to personal characteristics of the individual or group, which has the effect of imposing burdens, obligations, or disadvantages on such individual or group not imposed upon others . . .
The term applied to
behavior which would be considered discriminatory under the Human Rights Code, including humiliating, offending, or demeaning a person or group of persons on the basis of race, color, ancestry, place of origin, political belief, religion, family status, marital status, physical or mental disability, age, sex, sexual orientation, or conviction for a criminal offense unrelated to employment.
Discrimination was sometimes associated with the concept of stigma, as defined by the sociologist Erving Goffman: The phenomenon whereby an individual with an attribute which is deeply discredited by his/her society is rejected as a result of the attribute. The stigmatized person was set apart from those who perceived themselves as “normal.”
Sarah knew it now: she was stigmatized. In a society that valued youth and vitality, she knew that the sick and the weak had no place. She had been a person of power and agency. Now she was tipping over into the opposite camp.
What could she do to counter it? She knew how to fight the illness; she had an armory of treatments and doctors at her side. But what remedy for exclusion? She was being gently pushed toward the exit, kept in solitary confinement. What could she do to reverse the process?
Yes, she would fight, but how? Take Johnson & Lockwood to court for discrimination? She would have to resign. If she left, she would have no help, no medical cover. How would she find another job? Who would take them on, her and her cancer? Could she set up her own firm? An attractive prospect, but she would need investors, and the banks would lend only to a person in good health, she knew that. And besides, which of the firm’s clients would follow her? She could promise nothing, not even that she would be there in a year’s time to defend their interests.
She remembered the dreadful business a few years ago—one of her colleagues at the firm had defended a woman who had worked as a medical secretary for a doctors’ practice. She had complained of headaches, and spoken to the doctor, her employer, who had examined her. He made her undergo tests, then called her in to tell her she was fired: she had cancer. The official version was that she had been let go to cut costs, but no one was fooled. The case lasted three years, and the woman had won. She had died shortly afterward.
The discrimination being enacted against Sarah was less brutal. It did not speak its name. It was subtle, and by the same token, tricky to prove. But it was real nonetheless.
One morning in January, Johnson called her into his office, up on high. He asked how she was, with that fake air of concern. Sarah was fine, thank you. Having chemo, yes. He mentioned a distant cousin who had been treated for cancer twenty years ago and was doing just fine now. Sarah couldn’t care less about all the stories of recovery people regaled her with now, at every opportunity, tossing them like bones for her to chew over. They changed nothing for her. She wanted to tell him that her mother had died of it, that she felt sick as a dog, that he could keep his false compassion, thank you very much. What did he know about ulcers all over your mouth, so that it was too painful to eat, feet that burned so that by the end of the day you could barely walk, about feeling so exhausted that the smallest staircase seemed impossible? His show of pity masked his complete indifference to the fact that in a few weeks’ time she would have no hair, that her body looked so thin in the mirror it scared her, that she was scared of everything, scared of suffering, scared of dying, that she didn’t sleep at night, threw up three times a day; that some mornings she wasn’t even sure she could stay standing up. He could fuck right off with his caring concern. And his cousin could fuck off, too.
As always, Sarah was calm and polite.
Johnson got to the point: he wanted another partner to join her on the Bilgouvar case.
Sarah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It took her a few moments to find her voice, to object. Bilgouvar had been her client for years, she didn’t need anyone else to handle their interests. Johnson sighed and pointed to that meeting, the one meeting at which she had showed up late—she had got up at dawn to go to the hospital for tests before beginning her day at work. The scanner had jammed. Bad luck, said the technician apologetically, the last time that happened was three years ago. Hurrying to make up for lost time, Sarah had arrived at the meeting out of breath. It had barely begun. Of course, Johnson didn’t care two hoots about that, he wasn’t interested in Sarah’s excuses, the hospital hardware, none of it mattered. Luckily, Inès had been there. She was always on time, he said. Just perfect. And there was the day Sarah had collapsed during a hearing that had to be postponed, he reminded her. He was speaking in a soothing, honeyed voice now—the tone she loathed more than anything—telling her that he-understood-she-had-her-treatment-plan and that everybody-here-wished-her-a-full-and-speedy-recovery. Johnson was great at that, the ready-made phrases that sounded false, and hollow, and didn’t mean a thing. Sarah was-in-need-of-support, that was the-true-spirit-of-this-firm, we-understand-the-true-meaning-of-teamwork.
To support-her-through-this-difficult-time she would be working-from-now-on with . . . Gary Curst.
If Sarah hadn’t been sitting down, she would have dropped to the floor.
She would have preferred anything, anything at all, to that.
She would rather be fired. She would rather be slapped and insulted—at least then she would know where she stood. Anything but this slow, unbearable death by isolation. She felt like a bull being sacrificed in the ring. She knew it was pointless to object, nothing she could say would change his mind. Her fate was sealed. Johnson had made his decision. She was sick, and no longer of any use. No one could count on her now.
Gary Curst would swallow the Bilgouvar case whole. He would take her biggest client. Johnson knew how he operated. Together, they were picking her apart, while she was still alive. Sarah wanted to shout for help, to cry “Stop thief!” like a character in a kids’ cartoon. But it was a cry in the wilderness. There was no one to hear her, no one to come to her aid. The thieves were impeccably dressed, the ambush was invisible, even respectable and well-intentioned. A smart attack, perfumed with expensive cologne—aggression in a three-piece suit.
Gary Curst was exacting his revenge. With the Bilgouvar case in his portfolio, he would become the most powerful partner in the firm, the dream successor to Johnson. He wasn’t ill or weak; in fact, he was at the height of his powers, like a vampire engorged with the blood of others. At the end of the interview, Johnson gazed at Sarah with sad eyes and uttered the cruelest of phrases: You look tired, you should go home and get some rest.
Sarah returned to her office, destroyed. She had expected to be dealt some blows, but she hadn’t expected this. When the news broke a few days later, she wasn’t even surprised: Curst had been appointed managing partner. He would succeed Johnson in the top job, at the head of the firm. The appointment sounded the death knell for Sarah’s career.
That day, she went home in the middle of the afternoon. Th
is was something new to her—an hour alone in her empty house. Silence reigned. She sat on her bed and began to cry, because she was thinking about the woman she had been, even yesterday: a strong, determined woman with a place in the world—and it seemed to her that today, the world had abandoned her to her fate.
There was nothing to break her fall now. The long descent had only just begun.
This morning, one of the strands broke.
It seldom happens.
But it happened today.
It’s a disaster, a tidal wave
On a microscopic scale,
That wrecks the work of several days.
I think of Penelope on Ithaca, then,
Tirelessly reworking
Each day what she destroys in the night.
I must start all over again.
It will be a beautiful piece,
The thought consoles me.
Never lose the thread.
I must hold on.
Start over and go on.
Smita
Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Smita wakes with a start on the station platform where she had dozed off, with Lalita curled tight against her. In the first light of dawn, hundreds of people are running, carrying everything with them, in the direction of a train that has just pulled in. Frantically, Smita wakes her small daughter.
Come!
The train is here!
Quickly!
Hurriedly, she gathers their things—she has slept on their bag to protect it from thieves—then clutches her daughter’s hand and hurries toward the third-class railcar. The crowd throngs the platform, a great wave of people, pushing and elbowing and trampling on one another’s feet.
Shouts of Chalo, chalo! ring out everywhere.
Come on, come on!
Smita grabs the handle of the railcar door. The crowd presses hard all around them; she clings on tight. She tries to get Lalita on board before her, afraid the little girl will suffocate in the crush of desperate passengers. Suddenly she is seized with doubt and turns to the gaunt man beside her. Is this the train to Chennai? she shouts over the din. No! he replies, this one’s going to Jaipur, you shouldn’t trust the signs, they are often wrong.
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