Sunday's Silence: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  He wiped the rain off the edge of his car seat, drove out of the station with one hand as he held the coffee with the other. He was thinking about the Professor in his mortician’s suit and his “vintage” tie, the way he had once brought Blue a box of colored marzipans, sat next to her before a mirror and a jug of clear water to start his life with her.

  He thought how ironic it was that he had seen all the places of Blue’s memories before he had ever found her, that he had lived in the places and among the people she had come from. They had switched places—he and Blue—switched worlds and continents and yet, in the end, they had arrived at the same truth.

  He thought about all the years he had spent traveling through the mountains of Blue’s childhood, how years ago he had already sailed the waters of the Sea of Marmara. He thought of Blue’s mother turning around one day and offering a stranger her first smile, lifting the red veil that covered her face and letting him kiss her lips for the first time. He thought of the mad woman painting Blue’s destiny onto the palms of her hands, the Professor laying a new dress and a dozen gold bangles on the floor of her father’s tent.

  He had seen them all, known them in his own time.

  On the road before him, the black woman in the lavender suit painted her lips with a steady hand and arranged the paper flowers on her summer hat. Blue’s daughter ran across the yard with her hair black as a raven’s wings and her dress in flames. The Professor walked the streets of the Paris of his youth and imagined his first wife dangling alone from the ceiling fan in their apartment. They had raised their children in that apartment. They had entertained their friends, eaten dinner together, made love in that apartment.

  Adam had seen all of this, and he had seen Blue’s Appalachia as well. As a boy, he had sat in the same church alongside Anne Pelton and her friends, followed Little Sam Jenkins around the country as Blue would years later. He had repeated the same prayers Blue would in time learn, hoped that they would save him in spite of his lack of faith.

  He saw Isiah Frank walk across the house of his own deception, watching the creatures he had helped create, saw John the Baptist stand like Jesus on the cross. A woman with purple eyes and golden-red hair rolled onto him in the dark, put her lips to his ears, told him tales he could not help but believe.

  He was, in many ways, no different from the people in Blue’s stories: like her nomad father; the Professor, who had died when he could no longer reinvent himself; like Sam Jenkins and the believers who forsook their lives on earth in order to live in the Spirit—like all of them, Adam had spent his life wanting to leave.

  Somewhere out on the empty road, he saw the lines in the palms of Blue’s hands etched before him and realized that he, too, had traveled through a maze that in the end, would lead nowhere.

  Listen.

  There was a woman who loved a man—a man so alone and unreachable, she saw in him her own longings and thought she couldfind her way into his heart. So she laid herself before him like a tale and let him see her as if she were made of glass, cried her tears into a jar and gave them to him like a gift.

  Around you I spread my words like a wish, sprinkled the dust of all my dreams, the light of all the stars I had seen in my youth. I cast my story into your memories and onto your bed, onto the ground where you walked and into the night where you slept and all along, I prayed that it would keep you from leaving.

  But the day came when 1 ran out of words and found myself alone, at dawn in a city where sleep was impossible, in a house full of sorrow and the ghosts of small children. You had freed me from my enemies and then left, walked out of my house and into the mid-morning autumn sun without so much as a glance for me to follow.

  I stayed home and buried my husband. I opened his books, the small suitcase into which he had packed his clothes on the day he still believed he could escape. I hung the clothes back in his closet, spread his papers onto the desk in his study. I lit the lamp he used to read by, put his watch directly across from his chair where he always kept it. I wound the clock in the dining room, opened the drapes, returned his hat to the spot he used to set it when he came home.

  I gave him his house the way I had known it first—a place that would serve as proof of his civility, witness to his Western ways, relic of his distinguished life. When I was done I took my daughter's suitcase and walked out.

  Isiah Frank met me on the street.

  “There’s nowhere to go," I told him, “no chance to stay.” He smiled and took my hand, waved his arm against the dark night. Before us the street was covered with a film of shimmering silver dust.

  “These are your words,” Isiah said, “the ones you spoke to your lover, that you gave to him with your hope.”

  So I follow those words, walk along the edge of this translucent silver road that snakes through the night and glows like a promise in the dark. I think of a palace built entirely of glass, a song on the lips of a man who seduces every lover. I think of the gold in my mother's hair, the books on my husband’s desk, the snakes in my own hands—how they were all one and the same, nothing more than the promise of a different fate, nothing less than the one path that shines in the dark. In my fist I press the handle of my daughter’s suitcase and tell myself I should have shown her to you—should have shown you her pictures, should have let you see her eyes.

  Isiah Frank walks with me until we reach the house where Ifirst made love to you. Upstairs he shows me into your room. I see your empty bed, the sheets where I slept next to you, the mirror that until recently held my image.

  “I don’t know where he’s gone,” I tell Isiah. “I don’t think he’ll come back.”

  He smiles again and takes me to the dresser where he used to keep your clothes. I open a drawer and see that it’s filled with

  silver dust—tiny grains of light, soft as the sand at the bottom of a river, luminous as diamonds. I dig my hands into the light, let it fall through my fingers in straight lines.

  I open my daughter’s suitcase and take out her pictures, the tiny ribbons I once put in her hair, the satin shoes I put on her feet when she was barely a month old. I arrange them all on the dresser and stand back to watch.

  “This is my life,” I say aloud.

  Isiah Frank goes to the window and opens it wide. The air is cold against my skin. I hear the chimes ringing softly, see the dust—my own words—falling off them when they move.

  “Make a wish,” Isiah tells me in his director’s voice.

  Already I hear the sound of your steps, feel the beat of your heart against the silence of this house. In the mirror I see myself as if for the first time: a woman alone, separate from her story, removed at last from the hopes and illusions of all those who had painted themselves into her life. Then the stairs creak under your boots and the walls give in your presence, and you ’re standing in the doorway as if back from a thousand-year-old war. Your eyes ache for sleep, and your body is uncertain which way to turn, but I can read you by instinct, see your need as if it were my own. I walk up and touch the fabric of your shirt, close my eyes and feel the comfort ofyour presence, the weight of your hands that will catch me, I know, in midfall.

  “Make a wish,” I say, “and we will imagine it to life.”

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank my agent, Barbara Lowenstein, for crusading on my behalf.

  Thanks to Claudine Guerguerian for her cover; to Tricia van Dockum for fighting the good fight.

  1 am grateful to my husband, Hamid David Nahai, who believed in this book from the start and blessed it with his vision and courage.

  Thanks to my friends Adrienne Sharp, who guided me through the maze, and Marilyn Stackenfeld, who reminded me I could write.

  Thanks to my parents, Giti and Francois Barkhordar, who did not doubt.

  And to my children, Alex, Ashley, and Kevin, who have painted their colors into my life and will cast them still onto a thousand distant skies.

  ai, Sunday's Silence: A Novel