He Drown She in the Sea

by Shani Mootoo

  When Dolly saw the state of the room, her heart sank. Even Mrs. Sangha, who had gone down to unlock the room for Dolly, hadn’t realized how unpleasant it had become. There were cobwebs and spiders in the corners of the room. A thick albino lizard with half its tail missing lay in the far corner of the room. It rose up on its front legs and seemed to collapse again from its own weight. Dolly and Mrs. Sangha stepped back out of the room quickly. If there was a bed in there, it was buried under boxes of paper from Mr. Sangha’s business, and under boxes of Christmas decorations, old clothing, and whatnot, so you couldn’t even see it. Dolly kept her tiny house spotless—she didn’t have that many things, certainly nothing to store, nothing to save for any reason—and didn’t like the idea of sleeping in such a dusty space. Then Dolly remembered there was a night watchman who walked around the house. She apologized to Mrs. Sangha and asked if she and her son could please sleep upstairs, even the floor in the kitchen would be good, because she was more afraid of a prowling night watchman than of this war that people kept making a fuss about but of which she hadn’t seen any concrete evidence. Mrs. Sangha felt ashamed for suggesting they stay downstairs.

  That night Mrs. Sangha was happy for the company. It was strange to her not to have the radio on. She went to it and hesitantly turned it on, as if she might be punished by a shock from it, or an admonishment from a voice in it. There was only static, a wheezing and a high-pitched unmusical whistling. She sighed and turned it off. She got out candles in case of electricity blackouts, for it seemed logical to her that war and blackouts went hand in hand—she enjoyed the surmising and preparations—and she prepared the candles using the wax that dripped off a lit candle to cement stubs to saucers. She took down two dusty pitch-oil lamps from on a cupboard in the kitchen and washed and dried the glass shades. Dolly had never seen Mrs. Sangha so quiet, so busy and brisk in her movements. The four of them ate dinner in the kitchen. There was not much talking. The quiet was almost exciting, as if they were all waiting for something to happen. The boy watched Mrs. Sangha and his friend as they ate their dinner, sitting more upright at the table than he and his mother normally would. He followed Mrs. Sangha’s manner, but his mother leaned over her food as usual, her head bent toward her plate, never taking her eyes off the food. She did not use the spoon at the side of her plate. With the fingers of one hand, she pushed and pulled the food into a small mound, then, as she had been accustomed ever since she was a child, she balanced a mound on the upturned tips of her fingers and scooped it into her mouth. How he wished she would use the spoon this one time at least. However, Mrs. Sangha and the girl didn’t seem to notice. After dinner he helped to clear away the plates from the table. His mother washed the dirty wares and put away the leftover food.

  The girl left the kitchen for a wash and to get dressed for bed. Her mother made her wear a new dressing gown, taken from a drawer of new underwear and pajamas in the spare bedroom’s armoire. The boy washed himself and put on a crisp new pair of brown-and-cream pin-striped pajamas with drawstring pants that Mrs. Sangha kept wrapped in tissue paper in a gift box in the same drawer. That night, taking advantage of Dolly’s presence, Mrs. Sangha got her to prepare the night watchman’s cocoa and his slices of bread, but when they were ready, she herself called out to him. By the time Dolly had washed herself and pulled on a yellow cotton nightgown that Mrs. Sangha had given her, Mrs. Sangha had opened out the hideaway bed next to the piano and had already begun to prepare it. From the top shelves of the wardrobe in the spare room, she took out several blankets, too hot for use on that tropical island. She spread them on the hideaway mattress to soften it, as she said that she could feel the springs in it. She topped them with one of her good sheets. She finished the bed with a flowered top sheet and a heavy straw pillow in a case that matched the top sheet. It had to be admitted that even though she sometimes didn’t seem to understand anything about village life or poor people, and she paid far too much attention to events abroad, Mrs. Sangha was a very giving woman. But tonight there was an unusual urgency and determination about her actions. She was like a soldier of high rank; it was as if she understood it to be her duty to take care not only of her daughter but of her servant and the boy, and even of the watchman, for in a way, they were all her responsibility. They were all hers. It was, therefore, up to her to protect them from that great unknown called war.

  The children went into the front room that was reserved for guests and lay on the bed there, reading, telling each other stories. Mrs. Sangha went out to the verandah, checked to make sure that the door leading from it to the front stairs and front garden was locked. She sat in Mr. Sangha’s rocking chair in the dark. Dolly could hear the rocking chair making its rhythmic uneven lurch forward and lunge backward. She took a kitchen stool out to the verandah and waited for Mrs. Sangha to invite her to sit. They kept each other company long into the night, both waiting for the frightful wail of a siren. When nothing happened, Mrs. Sangha sighed with relief, disappointment, and tiredness. She and Dolly decided it was time to go to their beds.

  No sound came from the children, and when the two women went to check on them, they found them fast asleep. When Mrs. Sangha tried to awaken her daughter, intending to usher her into her own bed, the girl fussed so much that she left her there. The boy remained sleeping through it all.

  They left the children undisturbed in the front room. Dolly was expecting Mrs. Sangha to leave her to turn off the lights, but she encouraged Dolly to go to bed first. She knelt beside the bed and pulled the top sheet over Dolly’s shoulder, up against her neck. Placing her hand firmly on the top sheet, she squeezed Dolly’s shoulder and told her to sleep well, that everything was going to be all right. Even though the sheets smelled strongly of the camphor and sea grass, the bed was softer than any Dolly had slept in before.

  Mrs. Sangha stood up and went to the radio. Not being able to listen to it had a strange effect on her. She felt unusually alone. She stood watching the box. A realization caused her to hug herself as if she had become cold. She was feeling the pain of Narine Sangha’s absence. He and the radio were very much connected to each other in her mind and heart. She seemed to know where he was and what he was taking part in when she heard the voices of people in the radio, learned of events occurring here and abroad. All her listening was listening out for him and preparing for his eventual return. With the radio turned off, it was as if her tie to him had been cut.

  In the dark Dolly asked, “You thinking something, Madam?”

  “It strange. Four people in the house and a watchman outside. And yet the house feeling more lonesome than usual. That is all. Sleep good,” she whispered as she left the room.

  Mrs. Sangha lay awake well into the night, staring up at the dark ceiling. She listened for airplanes in the sky. There were none. For soldiers in the street. Only a drunkard disobeying the curfew could be heard singing as he made his way home or someplace else. She pursed her lips. Such a person should be in his house protecting his family. The boards of the house contracted and expanded as they usually did day and night, but in the quiet of the night, the creaking noises were noticeable. She listened to make sure that was all that was happening, the house and the boards breathing by themselves. There was no one, she was certain, walking about the house. When the tree outside of her bedroom window dipped in the wind and scraped the wall of the house, she held her breath and listened. It was only the tree stroking the house as it usually did when there was a wind. She was proud, knowing that she had, by herself, the capacity and ability to look after a household during a time of international crisis. But there was sadness in that pride, too. She hoped that wherever Narine Sangha was, whatever he was doing that night, that he, too, would be safe from the war.

  DAWN

  The sun’s warm hand brushed Mrs. Sangha’s body, and she awoke. She marveled that, in spite of the state the world was in, the sun still rose and shone, warm as ever on one’s body, and birds quarreled and quipped as usual in the tree outside her w
indow. The swishing of the brooms of the municipal Sunday street-cleaning crew pushing debris down the drainage canals at the sides of the road reassured her that at least the world of Marion was still in good order. She lay still, watching the sun stroll the length of her body and up the wall. The redness of first light gradually gave way to yellow that burned the room.

  Dolly, in the cooler drawing room outside, began to stir. Together they would prepare a breakfast for themselves and the children, and for the watchman, who customarily ate before leaving the property. Mrs. Sangha wondered what a day of war in the world would require of them. She thought about what she might wear that would gesture to everyone else on her street that she was ready to do whatever was asked of her. She would make the children dress properly, too, and she would comb her daughter’s long hair into two tight braids. She would put ribbons on the ends, not bright colorful ones but brown ones, the new brown velvet ones stashed away for special occasions in a drawer of the armoire. But she was jolted out of these musings by the outside front-door lock being rattled and prodded and turned.

  Dolly, being closer, had heard it, too, and had jumped up and wrapped the top sheet around her body. Through the sheer lace curtains veiling the glass pane of an interior doorway, she saw someone at the outside door attempting to open it. Mrs. Sangha hustled, but quietly, into the drawing room, pulling a dressing gown around her. She pressed a finger to her lips. She tiptoed to the door that led to the verandah. Peering through the slightly parted curtain of the inside door, Mrs. Sangha watched the door handle turn. She guessed, hoped, and feared all at once who it might be. She spun around and looked at Dolly, panicked. Before either of them could do anything, the front door opened. The scent of oak moss and lavender wafted into the house. Mrs. Sangha gasped and then began fixing her hair. She whispered urgently, “It’s Boss. Shhh, go back in the bed. He come back home. In the hour of need, he come back here.” She had to repeat “Go back in the bed” sharply before Dolly did as she was told.

  Mrs. Sangha made her way swiftly back into her bed—their bed—and, holding her breath, she closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. She tried to still her body, heaving with anticipation, tried to listen above the pounding in her temples. She identified the sounds of him walking around the L-shaped verandah to the door that opened onto the pantry. His keys rattled as he unlocked that door. He walked a few paces and stopped. She imagined he was looking around, but at what she couldn’t tell. The spicy cologne he wore had made its way throughout the house. His footsteps advanced and stopped. He was at the doorway of the drawing room. He retreated. Of course he would have seen someone in the sofa bed, but he would not have known who it was, as Dolly covered her face from his view. Mrs. Sangha heard him move into the kitchen area. Either he had lightened his footsteps or the linoleum in the kitchen had softened them. She heard the refrigerator door open. A cupboard opened and closed. After a few seconds the refrigerator door was shut. He walked to the end of the narrow kitchen. The slight clink suggested to her that he had placed a glass in the sink. He moved from the kitchen to the large open back room that served as an at-home office for him. His chair squealed along the floor as he dragged it away from the desk. Mrs. Sangha wondered if Patsy, the cleaning woman, had dusted his chair and the table that past week. The chair creaked as he sat in it. He stayed there for about five minutes. She couldn’t hear a sound, couldn’t tell what he was doing. Then the chair creaked again as he released it of his weight. He was at the door of the bedroom he used to share with her. He pushed it open and entered. He stood in the entrance of the room for a moment, oak and lavender boldly announcing him, surrounding him, guarding him. Then he entered the bathroom. Mrs. Sangha heard him lift up the lid and the seat of the toilet. She heard his pee hit the porcelain side first and then its long stream frothing the water in the bowl. He pulled the chain, and the toilet flushed noisily. With such a racket, if she didn’t stir, he would know that she was pretending, so, making a little production of it, she turned, yawned, stretched, and then opened her eyes and faced him. He was undressing, removing his suspenders and pulling his shirt out of his pants, unbuttoning it, doing all of this as if it were usual and quite expected. She did not know if he would come into the bed and lie next to her. Should she get up? she wondered. And if she were to remain and he were to lie there, how should she position herself? How could she even breathe calmly? And that lavender and oak moss. He wore it whenever he came to the house. She had not given it to him and didn’t imagine him buying it for himself. To her, its scent was that of aloofness, of the distance that separated them. It underlined her own bittersweet independence.

  Mrs. Sangha thought better of making a fuss. All she said was “You had no trouble traveling on the road?”

  “The driver didn’t use lights. He coast the whole way. Where daughter?”

  Several answers flashed through her mind in an instant, along with the consequences of each. Mrs. Sangha felt herself neglectful, leaving her daughter to sleep in another room without her. She didn’t want to say that she was in the same room with the washerironer’s son. She hurriedly got out of bed and said, “I’ll bring her.”

  Narine Sangha moved toward the door that led down the hall to the other bedroom and said, “She in the front room? Why she not in here sleeping with you?” He sucked his teeth and continued, “Never mind. I will go and wake her myself.”

  Mrs. Sangha tried to go before him, but he touched her shoulder in a firm gesture of holding her back and said, “I wouldn’t wake her for long; I only want to say ‘morning.’ Get some tea for me.” Then he said, “Who is that in the drawing room?”

  Mrs. Sangha stood where she was and whispered, “In the drawing room? Dolly.”

  She knew he wouldn’t know who Dolly was, but thinking of the boy in the bed as the washer-ironer’s son, she couldn’t bring herself to identify Dolly further.

  “Dolly? Who is Dolly?”

  She had no choice. “The ironer.”

  He nodded. Lavender and oak moss trailed him as he carried on down the hallway to the front room. She suspected that she wasn’t going to be getting him any tea right away.

  Narine Sangha stood at the door of the room. The strong scent had awakened the boy. He opened his eyes. Or rather, one could well say that morning the boy’s eyes were opened.

  He saw a man, a fair-skinned Indian man, standing in the doorway watching him. He knew instinctively who the man wearing a white merino vest and knee-length underpants was. He tried to sit up, but he was unable, as if his frame had been transformed into jelly. The man’s shoulders, the defined muscles of his chest, his thickset body frightened the child. The man came nearer to the bed. He stopped. He leaned his body to get a better look at the two children. He had a high forehead, curly black hair, a shiny thick black mustache. Although the man used a low voice, the boy heard the words squeezed through his clenched teeth: “What the arse is this?” The man kneed the mattress at the foot of the bed hard, and like a wind, he turned briskly out of the room.

  Were it not for the powerful perfume that had invaded the boy’s head and chest, he might have said that he was unable to breathe. It was as if a baker’s sack of flour had been dropped on his meager child’s chest. All the muscles in his body tingled and tickled, weakening him. He tried to budge his legs, to wiggle his toes, but his muscles seemed paralyzed.

  He was a child then, and what could he have known? But instinctively he understood something. Raleigh men, the men he knew best, were wiry and muscular, and they wore merinos that were stretched, ripped, full of holes through which they might in jest slip an arm and wear it like a fake sling. He was used to them smelling like the sweat of toiling, of engine oil, of sea entrails, their bodies hard and damp against him when they squeezed him affectionately or hoisted him in the air. He felt intuitively that this short, fair-skinned, muscled, perfume-scented man might more easily hit him than attempt to throw him playfully in the air.

  The man reentered the room like an even more forc
eful wind. Mrs. Sangha followed in his wake. When he saw her, the feeling of paralysis eased, and the boy sat up quickly. Narine Sangha grabbed his daughter’s arm roughly. She was jolted upright. “Daddy!” she said sleepily. He hoisted her roughly off, positioned himself behind her, and swiftly ushered her out of the room. The boy wanted to call out after her, to call out to his mother, even to shout at the man, perhaps to tell him not to push the little girl like that, to be gentle. But no words would form in his mouth. He looked at Mrs. Sangha pleadingly, but she didn’t protest the man’s actions. Rather, she took the boy’s hand and pulled him out of the bed onto his feet. The boy asked what was happening. Mrs. Sangha whispered to him to be quiet, to get dressed. Dolly came in and quickly finished dressing him, as if he were unable to do it himself. He asked her if that man was Narine Sangha. Dolly snapped under her breath for him to hush up, to mind his own business. The boy expected to see the girl once he was in the drawing room. Dolly, her face red and bloated with anger, held his hand tightly, and from where they were, he turned and twisted his head and body looking for his friend, but she did not come out to see him. He sensed that he should not protest.

  Mrs. Sangha was silent. She looked worried. Although he had seen this worried look several times before, and heard his mother say that if there wasn’t something to worry about, Mrs. Sangha would worry about that, he had never seen the stoniness that hardened her mouth. She whispered something to Dolly, barely moving her mouth. Dolly pushed the child ahead of her, holding his shoulders, steering him toward the front steps. Mrs. Sangha told them to wait out there. She ran into the house and came back almost immediately with a half-loaf of bread and an entire package of cheese and a knife. She shoved those and a bundle of crumpled paper in Dolly’s hands. Dolly opened her hand to look at the crumpled bundle, several dollar notes, and her face broke, ready to cry. As directed by Mrs. Sangha, they got into Narine Sangha’s car, and the chauffeur drove in the low dawn light, without use of the car’s head-lamps, all the way out of Marion.