Sunday's Silence: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  Isiah Frank opened the door in his Shakespearean costume, and walked Adam upstairs. He fell on the bed, exhausted, pressed his eyes together, and hoped he could erase every thought from his mind. Next to him, Isiah was making grand gestures and saying words Adam could not hear, so he stopped trying to understand, let his head sink into the pillow, and gave in to sleep.

  Adam.

  A thousand times these past weeks, I have awakened from a sleep in which I speak to you my last words.

  I stir at night, feeling the touch of your hand, the tips of your fingers against my spine. It’s like a child’s touch: light and unthreatening and innocent in its intentions, and it sends white sparks through my veins and behind my eyes, and pulls me into that state between sleep and awakening, when all my sensations are sharp and my mind races, lightlike, in a sea of darkness.

  I roll over and bury my face in the sheets, wanting the feeling to last, the ecstasy of knowing you are there, watching me, and that I can linger safely in your eyes.

  Then I realise the tragedy that has happened: that we have parted without a chance to speak the truth, that I have stayed silent a day too long, that my words, like an invisible web, will surround me now and pull me to oblivion.

  Lying in the dark, my sheets smelling like your skin, my body marked with your handprints, I call your name and pray that you will hear.

  “Turn around,” I say. “Hear me speak.”

  My HUSBAND HAS been preparing to leave for weeks.

  He heard her voice, but could not open his eyes to see her. He was still in bed, surrounded by darkness, and the more he tried to wake up, the deeper he sank into sleep.

  He packs at night, with the lights turned off, the windows shut. He has packed all our clothes and all of my daughter’s things, all the papers that may help us explain ourselves someday, all the pictures we took in the course of our lives together. Everything else—his books, our bed, the objects that have for so long defined us—he has sold or will leave behind.

  He had a life, once, he believed he could defend. He lost that life and in time, lost the conviction that he could build it again. His only hope now is to leave while he still has the legs to run—to leave and take with him the only thing—the only one—he has left.

  “THERE WAS A MAN who had a secret,” my husband told me in the days after our daughter died.

  “There was a boy who was born a mistake. ”

  He knew this from the moment he became conscious of himself—before he had speech or understanding or a sense of his own place in the world. As a child he had felt like an outsider looking through glass at his own image, aware that it looked wrong—that he looked wrong. He was certain he wasn’t meant to be where his birth had placed him, that he wasn’t meant to interact with and belong to the people who were his family. He felt removed from his mother, superior to his father. He had nothing in common with his siblings, and though he did love his grandmother, because he felt she came closest to appreciating his talents, he was aware that she was an old woman with little education and no real power outside her own family.

  The boy, on the other hand, was a great intellect in a small body, a refined spirit in an awkward figure, a burning ambition in limited flesh. He knew this without vanity and without excessive pride, with the same clarity as he knew any other fact of life.

  He had been born in the port city of Basra on the Shatt Al Arab River, a few hours’ journey from the Sea of Oman. His family had been merchants for many generations, and they had amassed a small fortune, which they used to educate their children and buy antique laces and European furniture for their homes. The city’s position as a trading post brought its inhabitants into contact with people from all parts of the world. The Professor’s family was cosmopolitan and westernised and aware

  of the ways of other peoples, but they were also bound by tradition: Girls grew up to marry and have sons. Boys were expected to enter the family trade and safeguard their fathers ’ wealth and good name.

  The Professor had grown up speaking Arabic and French and English, learning to count on an abacus and to keep numbers andfigures in his head. He was a good student—too good, in fact, for the liking of his father who saw the boy reading poetry and literature and quietly feared his son would become a homosexual. He had tried to discourage the boy from his studies, taken him to work instead, offered him every incentive to stop reading those books he liked so much. But even as a child the Professor had preferred the company of dead writers to the liveliness of the port and the sound of men unloading cargo from giant ships that had traveled a thousand seas.

  All summer long he sat in the drawing room in the big family house overlooking the river. Warm, humid air blew in through the open windows and cast a sheet of moisture on his face and hands. With every word he read, the Professor imagined himself one step farther from his home and closer to the West.

  He did not feel at liberty to share his feelings with anyone, because he didn ’t credit the others with enough largess of spirit to understand him. He had no relationship with his siblings and no friends at school. The other children thought him haughty and self-centered, but in fact, he knew, he was only following the direction of his own destiny.

  And his destiny, he feared, had been less than kind to him.

  He was an Arab in a town that was ruled by Western men, a scholar in a country that measured success by other means, a Jew in a world that belonged to others.

  He could have made peace with his Arab past by reminding himself of the great and illustrious history he had been a product of. The Arabs, after all, had one of the greatest empires in history, brought about an age of enlightenment that had transformed the civilised world.

  He may have been able to accept his family’s middle class mentality and their limited horizons, may even have taught himself, over time, to accept his body for what it was—frail and small and unimpressive, but commanded by a powerful mind.

  What he could not reconcile himself to, what caused him interminable shame, was being Jewish.

  He knew that his elders would condemn him for his thoughts, and so he hid them from his parents and later from his teachers. His father wanted him to grow up and become a merchant and his mother was planning his wedding even in his childhood, but secretly the little boy with the big ambitions was planning his escape.

  He learned that the seat of power in the world had long ago passed from the East to the West, and that the source of civilisation and respectability had been transferred from the old world to the new. So he gorged himself on every Western idea he could read about, and taught himself to speak French and German with as slight an accent as he could fake, and then he decided he would move—away from the humid little town with the rotting harbor and the small-minded merchants of silks and spices, and go to Paris, where men and ideas loomed larger than life.

  In this new world, the Professor thought, he would reinvent himself as the man he was meant to be.

  His only hope back then was his grandmother—the family matriarch and the person who controlled most of the wealth and, therefore, all of her sons. She understood and admired her grandson’s thirst for knowledge like no one else in their family or their town, gave him the nickname “Professor ” which quickly replaced his given name, and all through his childhood she protected him from his father’s disdain and his mother’s admonishments. She had selected him in her own heart as the heir to the family’s legacy, the one among all the grandchildren who would take her place when she died. She willed to him her emerald wedding ring and a chest full of antique linens—her dowry when she had married at age nine. But she was not at all prepared, the day the Professor turned eighteen and walked into her drawing room in the house in Basra, to hear that he wanted to leave.

  She sat that day in a wicker chair with pillows to support her back, a maid waving a fan behind her. It was in the years between the two wars. The West had already divided the Ottoman Empire and cast its footprints all over the Middle East. The grandmot
her listened to the Professor make his speech, then sat quietly and considered his request. She drank a glass of cherry sherbet—red as the paint that covered her lips and made her skin look even darker—then blew on a water pipe before she spoke.

  “If I let you go,” she said, afraid of her own wisdom, “you will not come back. The West will swallow you like a fish, and I will never see you again. ”

  The Professor then got on his knees and kissed the old woman s hands, promised he would honor her in life as well as in death, that he would return home anytime she asked, and would come back to bury her. Even so, he had to wait a year before she relented.

  He TOOK HIS INHERITANCE and her chest full of embroidered laces, then headed for the capital to start his journey. At the passport office in Baghdad, he bribed an official to write Professor on the line where his name was meant to be, then bribed him again to write Islam for his religion. It was easy, fair, and right.

  It was also practical—to go to the West with a new name and to pass as a Muslim instead of a Jew. Most people in the West were hardly aware that there were Jews or Christians among the Arabs. Muslims, like Jews, circumcised their boys, and most of them were dark like the Professor, so he had every expectation of being believed.

  In Paris he spent the farewell money his parents had given him on a pair of dark suits and a hat, rented a room on rue de Ribe across from a tailor’s shop, ate rabbits foot marinated in white wine sauce every night. He studied at the Sorbonne and took walks in the Jardin des Tuilleries or on the Rive Gauche, visited museums on Sunday afternoons, drove into the countryside, and told himself he had arrived—that he had swallowed his secret and taken flight from his past, and had managed to become the man he wanted to be. He wrote home only once— to provide his address and to say he was well—and he did not feel the slightest bit of guilt for having left behind those who had loved and sustained him up to that stage. He knew he had never belonged to them. He expected they knew it too.

  He had been at the Sorbonne for three years when his first wife started courting him. He had known other women before her—classmates, neighbors, girls who worked in the shops and cafes he frequented—but he had never looked at any of them

  with any level of interest, and he may have gone his whole life unaware of the influence of the opposite sex except for the teacher who called him into her office week after week and engaged him in long conversations that spilled into the night.

  She was a professor of psychology at the school of humanities. She was older than he by twelve years, taller than he by four inches. She was not pretty, he thought—not now when she was in her thirties and wore drab clothes and dark lipstick, and not before when she had been younger and had long hair she washed in beer and curled with rollers. She had white-blonde hair, blue eyes, freckled skin that aged much too rapidly compared with that of Eastern women. Her hands were large and rough and full of veins—the hands of a woman who has never had a servant and who believes in keeping her kitchen floor spotless at the cost of ruining her health.

  But she drank endless cups of coffee and chain-smoked fil-terless cigarettes while she talked, spoke in the confident, assertive manner reserved in the East for men. She motioned with her hands when she spoke, argued with male colleagues as if she were their equal. The Professor had seen her walk to her office early in the morning with a briefcase full of books and a cigarette in her hand, and he had thought that she looked lonely and lost and just a bit tired of her own strength. Then he would see her walk into class carrying a stack of students ’ papers, her glasses pushed up on top of her head, and he thought she was a formidable woman with endless confidence and an even greater intellect. Suddenly he was in awe of everything she said.

  She was a disciple of Carl Jung s, he learned, an avid believer in his theories on the human mind, a great admirer of his writings in general. She agreed with Jung s views of American blacks as ignorant and incapable of analytical thought, shared his view of Jews as retrograde. She believed in the existence of a superior race—a better, more correct, more ideal version of humanity.

  The more the Professor heard her speak, the more he found himself in agreement.

  It never occurred to him that her views of the inferior people might affect the way she thought of him as well. He had never seen himself as part of that race. Wanting to impress her, he spent restless hours researching the works of Carl Jung and writing passionate papers, which he presented to her in class. She liked his enthusiasm, she said, his old-fashioned manners, the touching, almost eccentric way he wore nothing but dark suits to school. She observed that he was always alone and that he never appeared to crave another's company, that he seemed content within himself and his surroundings, and she liked this, because she was a woman who was growing too old and too lonely too fast.

  When he went to her office to discuss a paper, she looked him straight in the eye, smiled when he spoke, touched her own hair as if to reassure herself that she was attractive. Years later she would confess to him that he was only her second lover. The first one, barely out of high school, had left her waiting in line outside a smoke shop.

  All through his fourth year of university, the Professor went into his teacher’s office and read and discussed the works of

  Carl Jung. She helped him apply for a scholarship to pursue a doctorate, recommended him to the faculty of the school of languages. When he was accepted she invited him to her house to celebrate.

  “Bring a bottle of wine,” she said, “and we'll make love.”

  Suddenly the Professor was terrified that she might discover his secret.

  He was thrilled that she had thought of him enough to want to seduce him, but along with the sense of elation came the fear that he may let her down, the suspicion that if she knew his true origins, she would see in him not the intelligent, sophisticated, self-made man that he was but the pathetic merchant's son, the Arab Jew, that his family had wanted him to be. He was so bothered by the possibility of being found out that he considered not accepting her invitation but in the end he went along, and after that he went to her house every week and then every night, and by the end of the summer, they spent all their time together.

  It wasn't that he enjoyed making love to her so much, or that he found her company indispensable. She was the one who sought him, in bed and out, who clung to him like a teenage girl in need of approval, and who threw jealous fits every time he was less than responsive. What he liked about their affair was that she—a Western woman of refined origin—wanted him so much, that he shared such common ground with her, that in her eyes—she, who could detect the smallest of faults in people belonging to every race—he was a man worth loving.

  They were married on New Year’s Day, 1930, in a church ceremony attended by members of the university faculty. He gave her his grandmother’s emerald, certain it would impress their guests and even the priest, but afterward he heard her colleagues whisper that she had given herself to an Arab out of desperation and that the marriage wouldn ’t last.

  He moved into her apartment with his chest full of laces and his many stacks of books, continued his doctoral studies while she taught to support them both. They had three children in quick succession—girls with freckled skin and blue eyes and their mother’s pale, thin lips. She dressed them in identical clothes, cut their hair short, and taught each to eat with a napkin on her lap. He watched them grow up from behind his desk piled high with papers, and wondered if they bore any hidden trace of his true origins—if they would betray him one day through their bodies or the workings of their minds. He wondered if they would grow to find him unacceptable, if they would be ashamed of having an Arab father.

  Throughout the ’30s, the Professor buried himself in his work, and let his wife raise the children and support the family. He let her invite friends into their apartment and sit with them drinking coffee all night and discussing the difference between the races and the ways these affected the development of mind and thought and language. When he
sensed that the friends were uncomfortable discussing their views with him—because he was an Arab and by definition inferior—he went out of his way to stress his convictions and distance himself from his people. He put his arm around his wife and propped his daughters on his knees—-look how blonde and white they are, he wanted to say, look how they love me.

  Once he had earned his degree, he found a research job at the university and made it his mission to compare the origins of Romance and Germanic languages with those of Eastern tongues. Then the Second World War broke out.

  The Professor and his wife kept the children out of school, ate rationed food, listened to the radio day and night. They watched Hitler march through Paris, up the Champs-Elysees, under the Arc de Triomphe. The Professor lost his research grant and was advised he'd best keep a low profile. His wife was recruited to aid in the propaganda effort.

  She wrote articles and gave lectures affirming the superiority of the Aryan race and demonifing the Jews. She took her children to rallies in support of the German conquerors, and afterward spoke to her husband with breathless enthusiasm about everything they had seen and felt and envisioned.

  She was not a bad woman, the Professor knew. She was a good mother and a devoted wife, a responsible citizen, a diligent teacher. She would not have hurt anyone directly. She was only dealing with ideas.

  “The principle, you see, is what matters,” she said.

  But the principle led to acts of destruction, and the theories she voiced on paper found their way into the lives of individuals, and slowly the Professors blue-eyed Aryan wife became part of the machine that destroyed Jews and Gypsies and Poles.

  He might have spoken up then, but he was too afraid, too ashamed, too lost in the make-believe world of denial and longing to take a stand. He told himself he had gone too far to retreat, that any vestige of his Jewish past had washed away in the oceans he had crossed to come here. He told himself it did not make sense for him to take a stand against principles he had believed in all his life, that he should defend, albeit only verbally, the races he had always held in low regard. He told himself it would be suicide, that his wife might suspect his origins if he spoke, that she might turn him over to the Nafs, who would haul him away in a cattle car with the others.