The others looked from Nioreg to Delaksha and wondered, Bird? Nioreg pushed back his chair and stood up. He threw down his napkin and gave them all a curt nod. Delaksha reared up and moved to block his way. “You will talk to me.”
They stood at the door as if carved from the floor, uneven-sized pugilists, scowling at each other. Nioreg moved close. Delaksha stood strong. Nioreg lowered his head. He tilted Delaksha toward him, his hand on the back of her neck, her feet off the floor. Nioreg kissed her on her mouth. One, two, three…nine seconds. He returned her to the ground. Smoothed her hair. Bowed. Stepped to her right and walked out of the mess.
Delaksha froze. Then hand to mouth. Hair strands floating. Tears. Mucus slid down her hands. Melting from within. Ayaana watched, discomposed. She turned to Teacher Ruolan, who, seeing her look, poked at her fish, then glanced at the woman in her sheath lemon dress sobbing alone at the door. “Chi doufu,” she muttered.
No one else spoke.
The passengers and crew left the mess, tiptoeing around Delaksha. Ayaana hovered, fingers fluttering. When it was her turn to leave, her steps were slow. She touched Delaksha’s arm on her way out.
[ 42 ]
Steam shower. The henna lines her mother had painted into Ayaana’s body were beginning to fade. Ayaana touched flesh, its softness, and bones—her scrawniness. Touched her mouth, wondered what lips meant to a body: to taste being? The fluttering thing, the confused thing, the stuttering yearning thing inside a woman’s life. She returned to her room, changed into nightclothes. Lay on the bed, her hands beneath her head. She turned and glimpsed the niche her suitcase was latched into. She got up to drag it down.
* * *
—
Ayaana found Delaksha leaning against a wall, staring at the sea, hugging her body. She went and stood near her. “Henna?” Ayaana asked. “I can do it for you here.”
Delaksha turned to her. “I know what I saw.”
Ayaana then gave her a small dark brown bottle half full of rose attar. Shyly: “Please, take it.”
“Your mother’s?”
Ayaana nodded as she knelt down. She started to spread out the basics: a plastic-looking bag shaped like a cone; yogurt-textured green paste, black in the silver evening light.
Delaksha crouched next to her. “Honey, I couldn’t.”
Ayaana looked at her. “Keep it.” She laid out her henna kit. “Sit,” she said, surprised by how lucid her voice was.
Delaksha sat down in front of her. Ayaana sat cross-legged. This was her first practice without having her mother nearby. “I start with your feet.” She tapped Delaksha’s foot. Delaksha shifted. Ayaana tugged off the black heels and settled the right foot on her own thigh. “The stem of a vine,” Ayaana said, using the henna paste in a thin cone to draw a finger line on the ankle. “Jasmine petals. First I wipe your feet. Mother’s halwaridi.” They settled into silence, and the scent of wild roses suffused the space for a moment, overwhelming the smell of oil and diesel.
* * *
—
Almost two hours later, Nioreg appeared, white shirt flapping, half swallowed by the night. Stillness. Waves, wind, lusterless quarter-moon in a black sky. He cleared his throat. “Miss. I allowed myself to be provoked. I am sorry. I beg your forgiveness.”
Women’s silence—a capacity to be and act as if nothing has been said or heard. Ayaana colored in whorls on the vine that circumnavigated Delaksha’s feet like a dervish dance weaving a spell; in that possessed, cramped corner of the cargo ship, its fulcrum was ocean, wind, and Ayaana’s hands.
Nioreg waited, his head bent.
Delaksha smiled.
Ayaana saw the smile and wondered. She then leaned forward to blow on both Delaksha’s ankles. “Don’t move. Let it dry,” she whispered.
Delaksha said, “Oh, honey. Oh, honey.” She meant “thank you.”
Ayaana gathered her things.
“I am sorry,” Nioreg repeated.
“Are you? I am not,” Delaksha replied.
White froth on the sea’s surface. Sea drops spattered them, a sprinkling of cold. Nioreg’s low, rumbling pitch: “Ortolan bunting. Hortulanus.”
Delaksha asked, “Otto who?”
“The bird,” Nioreg said. “Ortolan bunting.” Quiet. “Must have bolted from someone’s net.” Tense body stance, as if suppressing fury. “Lost its bearings.” Silence. “She found us.” A soft, cool wind wafted over them. An unseen creature’s screech sawed into the night, then faded out. Delaksha got up, shook her cramped legs. She interlaced her fingers and raised her arms above her head, palms facing upward. “Storm in a few days,” Nioreg said, watching the dim light glance off the woman’s bare feet.
She asked, “How can you tell?”
“Wind on waves.”
She smirked. “Sooo…weapons are now allowed aboard freighters?” Nioreg gave her a death stare. Delaksha blinked. “The truth, dear, can help me unsee everything…except for the Otto-thing bird.”
Ayaana, who had been sidling away, faltered. She was curious about the crackling atmosphere as Nioreg and Delaksha circled each other.
The tension grew.
Nioreg submitted, “I work in security.”
“For the ship?”
“That, too.”
Delaksha then said, “Thank you.”
“For what?” he asked.
“The truth.”
Nioreg corrected her. “A truth.”
“It suffices,” Delaksha said.
“I can rely on your discretion, miss?”
“Naturally. And…Delaksha. My name.”
A curt nod. “Then bonsoir.”
“No, not yet,” Delaksha said quickly. “Thank you for saving the birdling.” Nioreg frowned. She explained. “Your look…that touch. Wanted it for myself. I ached to be the bird in your hands.”
Stupefied, Nioreg said, “I must go.”
Delaksha at once leaned over to slip her hand into Nioreg’s. She swung their intertwined hands. Nioreg was wary. Flight- or fight-ready.
She flows, Ayaana observed, her eyes large. She pours into life. She flows through every “no” and makes it her “yes.”
Delaksha said, “I’m married.”
“I apologize again,” Nioreg answered.
She continued, not sure about her desperate sense of urgency, as if she had to speak, as if she were the small bird in a big man’s gentle hands. “However, I’ve run away from home.”
“I see.” A tiny smile, eyes transfixed by their clasped hands.
She said, “You don’t. Not yet. The dog bit me.” She turned their joint hands to show her bruise. “I’m that cliché spouse who keeps ‘running into doors, windows, and other hard objects’…until the dog bit me. His name is Pontius. The dog, I mean.”
Nioreg waited.
She said, “Heard it.”
“What?”
“Your thunder. Sensation in soul, dread before an assault.” Nioreg’s hands closed over Delaksha’s. Experimentation. She said, “I’m shuffling words. Truth is, I’m embarrassed about a truth.”
“Which?”
“My sadness.”
Quiet.
He was inundated. Transfixed by this tangled yarn. How did he get cast into Delaksha’s skein of messy veracity? He was as vigilant as a besieged sentinel. She frowned. Ocean swells. A temporary red hue stained the night skies. A spot of light was the only lingering memory of a day that had disappeared. She asked, “You married?”
“Long ago.”
“What happened?”
Nioreg stiffened.
“You can tell me now, or tell me later, but you will tell me.”
Hoping to silence her, grasping for lies, tempted to lose his masks, he almost laughed. He would scare her. “All dead when I found them.” He waited for her reactio
n.
She looked back at him. “Them?”
“Wife, four children—three sons, little girl, Annick…” He stopped.
Delaksha burrowed her face into Nioreg’s arm. Eyes wet. A muffled “You poor, poor man. You poor, lovely man. What, for fuck’s sake, happened?”
“War.” Puzzled. “Poor”? “Lovely”? “The twenty-first century battle frontiers now include homes and dining rooms.” Stiffening. Clambering for control. “Excuse me, madame.”
She sighed. “You brave soul. What a horrible, horrible thing to experience.”
And, for the first time since that night of horror, he remembered the stench and the death of grief. It had been a different season. Returning the veil over memory. Returning to amnesia. The ocean, its surging. This woman, her madness. A school of small fish leapt in synchrony out of the water. The waves called, the wind responded. He needed to escape.
“Good night.”
Delaksha said, “If the storm kills this ship, we’ll be the ones that others come home to and find dead, new immigrants in the never-go-back-again kingdom.”
Hard silence. “It is getting late. Now I must go and rest.”
Her voice was gentle. “You are a soldier.”
“Yes.”
“Because of what happened to them?”
Nioreg shut his eyes. “Became a different soldier.”
Splash in the water—something anonymous and large. Then Delaksha said, “Ask me anything.” Pause. “Ask me about beginnings.”
“Why?”
“This is one.”
“What?”
“Beginning.”
“Yes?”
“Us.”
“Us?”
“Yes.”
“C’est une chose à laquelle je n’avais pas pensé.”
“You think too much.”
“Yes.”
“ ‘Us’ is unthinkable.”
“Us?” Bemused.
“Yes.”
“What is ‘us’?”
“Woman, man, curiosity…desire. So ask me about beginnings.”
“D’accord. How did you meet your husband?”
She groaned. “Why him?”
“Phantoms are interesting. He is handsome, no doubt?”
“Rather.”
* * *
—
Delaksha had nicknamed him “The Adversary,” as a joke, when they met in the cloisters of the Social Sciences Division at Oxford University in England, and loathed each other at first hearing during a debate on “Usury and Third World Debt.” One late-spring evening, in a shared tutorial, they found each other again, and immediately took up opposite positions in a discussion of “Fiduciary Stewardship and the World Bank.”After the session, they had continued their snarling down streets, and into a discreet restaurant, where they ate, argued, drank wine, argued about who should settle the bill—until they were politely ushered out by management. They had carried on their argument into Delaksha’s dodgy rented digs, where, mildly drunk, they agreed that they both intended to change the world, but differently. The argument turned to methodology, doctrine, and a frenzied stripping of clothes, a ferocious mating.
Delaksha told Nioreg, “A malignant magnetism.” She made a face. “With flowing black curly hair, thick red lips, an intricate mind, and Kama Sutra lusciousness, I wielded a deft upper hand.” She laughed. “So I thought. We got married a year later, in Grisons. A civil ceremony conducted in Romansh, witnessed by bored Swiss strangers.”
“Felicitations,” drawled Nioreg.
“Fuck you,” replied Delaksha.
Titters.
A rumble like thunder followed by a streak of bright-purple light in remote skies. Another rumble. Delaksha shuddered.
“Work took us to Kenya. Supposed to be for a year.” The wind on the water. “But we fit. The husband, the country, and I. I had the children there. They also fit.” The wind whipped Delaksha’s hair around her face. Why am I blabbing so much?
“Is it true,” Delaksha asked Nioreg, the stranger-confessor, “that there are bats that can suck your blood as you sleep, and all you might feel of the draining is a sweet-sweetness, and only when you wake up do you realize how grievously mutilated you are?”
They shivered. Delaksha murmured, “We adapt, you see.”
In Nioreg’s head, a sudden headache-giving hammering. Listening in spite of his inner terror. What am I letting myself be dragged into?
Delaksha’s mind dipped into her past: when she had flitted from person to person in a large, well-lit room with chattering fervor. That night, a harassed-looking woman whose lipstick had run onto her neck had grabbed Delaksha by the arm and croaked, “What is your secret? Tell me how to be happy.” The question had almost dissolved the gilded pressure cooker in which Delaksha lived. Steel-willed, she had kissed the woman’s cheek before swirling away, her dark blue gown rustling and glinting in the light. Now Delaksha moved away from Nioreg and reached for the guardrail.
Ayaana’s openmouthed paralysis, her intense listening and a new fear of life, its mysteries, and how it lived in a woman. Delaksha spoke to the darkness. “Gross protoplasmic suckiness consuming every good as it shrouds itself with a veil of lofty worthiness. It makes itself the ‘Author of Right,’ to preside over others’ life and death.” Tears reached Delaksha’s jaw. She bit her nails. “Imagine needing to screw that.” Delaksha swung toward Nioreg. She pounded the rails. She wiped her face.
Nioreg watched the woman’s uneven silhouette shift inside the empyrean rose-colored foreshadowing of dawn, or was it a retrospective? The wind grabbed her hair and tossed it around. She was maskless. Et ecce mulier. A sigh. He felt the breaking of his mask. Not because of this odd woman exposing her naked soul to him, but because he was quite suddenly weary of the human games in life. Nioreg rubbed an area that chafed within his chest. Cela aussi passera. Waves slapped the side of their ship, keeping time, dipping him into memories of the women in his life. Waves and the chorus of sea creatures, the ship in movement, and in the shadows, thinking she was unseen, the young Kenyan girl now as enmeshed as he was by the wild rubric that was a mystifying woman’s life. Falling out of time. It was a dark and sultry night; the perfect setting for fallen and falling creatures to meet.
Delaksha leaned over the rails, and then Nioreg was reaching for her, imagining himself as a hero preventing a death rather than delivering it. But she was merely angling for a better view of the ship’s frothy wake. His arms were hard around her body, and she tilted her head up at him.
“I’m your bird.” She laughed, and then she asked, “Share with me a cigar.”
Nioreg raised a brow. He suddenly shook his head. He rocked back and forth, prelude to a huge, soundless laugh. His sides ached. Who is she?
Delaksha retreated to retrieve portions of her story. “Nothing can purge the core where horror broods. Do you understand?”
Nioreg grunted, “I do.”
“My children are ashamed of me,” Delaksha added. “So I left.” She watched Nioreg, expecting judgment. Nothing. Her children had been unimpressed by her drunken tottering, extravagant, and loud proclamations. Delaksha said, “Now I’m going home to Mummy.” A dry laugh. A thought: I’ll walk to the place where the waters end. Where had she read that? Her lips trembled. “She will be most surprised to see her prodigal return.”
* * *
—
Ayaana imbibing words, hearing resonances of her poet guides— Hafiz, Rabi’a—seeing herself looking out into the world, prayerless. Ayaana saw Delaksha’s words, her story pieces, codes, gestures, lines, silences, as clues in an emerging map of life. Ayaana watched two battle-worn humans reach for each other, their look naked, and so horribly raw that she had to turn away, but not before she saw space adjust itself to contain them. Nioreg had lifted Delaksha’s hands t
o the dim light. The stone in her wedding ring glittered.
Nioreg touched the ring. “What’s your hope?” he asked Delaksha.
“Deliverance.”
“How?”
“Via purgatory. I need fire.”
Nioreg stroked the swollen part of her hand. “Limbo is better.” He blew on her painful hand. “No expectations.” She winced. “This husband—if you desire, I’ll return for him.” Nioreg stooped to taste Delaksha’s mouth.
She asked, “And pain will dissolve?”
“It can be balanced, no?”
“Ah, my dear.” She pulled down Nioreg’s face to hers. “It is ‘delete’ and ‘restart’ I desire.”
Nioreg nodded. He took her hand to pull off her ring. Delaksha’s fingers curled ever so lightly before she stretched out her fingers again. When he had the ring in his hand, he dropped it into her hand.
Ayaana watched Delaksha turn toward the sea to hurl her ring into it. They all watched it rise and fall. Stillness.
Nioreg engulfed Delaksha.
Nioreg said, “Your ortolan bunting…”
“Yes?”
“It is pursued by demons, too.”
“What?”
“French chefs, for example.”
“Tell me.” A laugh and a catch in Delaksha’s voice.
* * *
—
Ayaana would next hear about a sumptuous songbird—a chatty bird with orange, brown, gray, and olive feathers whose journeys into Africa got hijacked by men who raised nets on behalf of a cult of chefs who sought to imprison this little bird and store it in a blackened cage. She heard how some of these villains plucked out the bird’s eyes so it would perceive an endless night, which would provoke it to eat even more. Ayaana then heard how the bird would be force-fed until it was ready to burst. This was the signal that it was ready for drowning alive in a vat of Armagnac. After it was killed, it was plucked, roasted, and served whole, with its bones intact. The bird would be gobbled down by one of a select group of gluttons, who would cover their heads with a white cloth, the better to absorb aromas arising from the spiced and liquored suffering of a small creature, the easier to evade the gaze of disgusted holy angels.
The Dragonfly Sea Page 24