The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  Those hairline cracks. She grasps at their strands swaying sensuously just beyond her grasp like the tentacles of other thoughts.

  4

  YOU ONCE TOLD me, my dear, of the time your husband got up to fetch himself another beer and after a step or two in the direction of the kitchen slumped to his knees. And even as his heart seized up in his chest, the only thing he said was your name.

  Your name …

  You were his first thought in a situation where you were also the last.

  That too, my dear, I have always envied. I never achieved such priority in my husband’s heart …

  Very kind of you to say so, my dear, but you’re wrong. I do know, and my husband himself made it clear to me …

  Cruel? No, no, he wasn’t brutal about it, he wasn’t looking to hurt me. Indeed, I’m certain it never occurred to him that he was hurting me. And once I had understood his message, there was no point in discussing it with him. The message itself was a full-stop, you see.

  For me, it began strangely enough, with whispers — and went, from there, to words offered but unspoken. This was one of those moments when you remember precisely what you were doing, no matter how trivial — and I was plucking my eyebrows. You remember that barbaric beauty ritual, Mrs. Livingston? Tweezing out every hair and grease-pencilling back in an arched perfection? In any case, there I was leaning in close to the mirror, when I heard whispering through the bathroom door. There was a light knock and Celia called my name. I told her to come in, and the door swung slowly open. In the mirror I saw Celia, with Cyril just behind her. They both looked stricken. And then Celia told me my husband had been shot.

  I don’t remember releasing the tweezers, but I remember clearly their crystal clattering when they hit the sink.

  They didn’t know much more — just that he was alive, and Celia shushed Cyril when he used the word “still.”

  At the hospital, the doctor in charge — a childhood friend of my husband’s — told us that although he was badly hurt his life was not in danger. He ascribed it to luck. One bullet had passed through his neck, but cleanly, doing miraculously little damage. Another bullet, had it found its mark, would have destroyed his heart — but it hadn’t found its mark. A gold medallion — a gift he received for his work in the community — got in its way. The medallion had been bent concave and my husband’s chest was bruised, but there was no other damage. His speech-making would be curtailed for a while, the doctor said, and he would for some time appear to give Louis Armstrong impressions, but eventually his voice too would return to normal.

  I alone was allowed to see him. An armed policeman stood at his door, and his room, darkened, full of machines and glowing monitors, was in electronic twilight. He was partially sedated, but that part of him that was awake was lucid. He couldn’t manage a smile, but his hand responded to mine — recognition, comfort. But then, suddenly, it began to shake. I was startled, I thought something was wrong, and reached for the call button. But he seized my wrist, calmed me — and made me see that he was merely making a writing motion, that he wanted a pen.

  I gave him one from my purse, and held up a small notebook so that he could scratch out his words. And what he wrote in shaky block letters was this: Dawn follows midnight.

  Tears came to my eyes. I stroked his hair and whispered to him that yes, indeed, we would have our dawn, he and I, once past all this.

  He shook his head, and uttered a growl. I couldn’t decipher what he wanted to say. He repeated the growl, with pain — and when his meaning came clear, I thought my heart would explode. What he had said was, Torch. Torch, Mrs. Livingston — the symbolic torch of his political life. That was the dawn that would come.

  This was the moment, my dear — and you know that I choose my words carefully — this was the moment when I knew my husband to be in some way a monster.

  I almost didn’t pass the note on, you know. I almost ripped it up. But he had taken the fight out of me, and so I handed it to Cyril, knowing precisely where I stood in my husband’s affections.

  Knowing too that, in handing over what was to become an icon in my husband’s growing legend, I was sealing myself off forever from one kind of life and condemning myself to quite another.

  5

  THE MORNING SUNLIGHT leaking in through the edges of the window is shattered and diffuse.

  PHOTO: A NIGHT OF SILHOUETTES. HEADS AND SHOULDERS AGAINST AN UNCERTAIN LIGHT. AND A HAND REACHING UP: FINGERS SPLAYED? FACING THE LENS OR AWAY FROM IT? THE MOMENT MYSTIFIED.

  She knuckles the sleep from her eyes, thinking this might clear her sight.

  But the photograph she has taken from the box Penny has left behind remains what it is: the merest suggestion of people, of place, and of time. She will have to be led into it, will have to depend on others to show her what she cannot see, no matter how hard or how often she wipes her eyes.

  She tosses it back into the box, taps the flaps shut: watches them fall together as soundless as shutting eyelids.

  She glances at her watch. The morning is well advanced and already, in the compressed air of the room, she feels the promise of a searing day.

  6

  SHE KNEW JIM was already up when the hiss and shuffle of the espresso machine nudged her into wakefulness.

  Had it been a sunny summer morning — stretching, she allowed herself the little fantasy — he would have set a small table outside: strong coffee, raisin buns, thick newspapers and a fresh-picked flower in a vase. But it was a Saturday morning in the middle of winter, and the warmth awaiting her in the living room would be dryer, crisper, less diffuse, with a hint of smoke absent from her fantasy.

  As she wrapped herself in a thick dressing gown, she pictured him preparing the fireplace: crumpling newspaper, arranging kindling, lighting the arrangement, the whole business performed with a precision and pride that made her think of the accomplished woodsman he claimed to have been in his late teens. When he spoke of that time — of hiking alone deep into the woods to the edge of a lake, setting up camp, gutting the fish hooked from the water — he spoke without sentimentality, describing a life once thoroughly enjoyed but with no regret for its loss. He had the ability, she saw, to fully inhabit the world to which he belonged.

  She opened the blinds, peered out. It had snowed the night before — the best kind of snow, thick and moist, building itself up along every wire, every branch, every twig, turning the world monochrome and inverting it, so that everything seemed cast in its own negative: inside out.

  She stood there, enjoying her sense of well-being, enjoying the weave of her reflection, indistinct in the windowpanes, fitting itself into the larger world outside.

  She pressed herself closer to the window and, instantly, her breath fogged the glass.

  In the living room, everything was as she expected: the fireplace brisk with flame, Jim in his easy chair before it, the coffee, the raisin buns, the newspapers neatly arrayed on the coffee table.

  Anubis, curled up in front of a heating duct, cast a baleful glance in her direction then turned lazily away.

  Jim looked up, offered a kiss, his palm reaching to caress the back of her neck.

  She could see that something was on his mind. There was a quietness to him, part of him absent, absorbed elsewhere. “How was he this morning?”

  “He’s fine.” The reply — quickly mumbled, dismissive because unconsidered — denied itself. He leant forward to pour her some coffee. “Fairly lucid, you know. But these days talking to Dad’s like talking to someone who’s watching television at the same time.” He sat back in his chair, peeled open the newspaper and scanned the pages.

  Yasmin sat down, sipped at her coffee. She no longer made a point of being close by for Jim’s weekend calls to his father at the retirement home. They were always painful. The old man’s decline following Jim’s mother’s sudden death had been swift, his resistance to the retirement home heart-rending. Yasmin had found there was little she could do to help Jim except hold his han
d and try to still the tremors that ran through it. As the old man’s faculties diminished, as his coherence grew less certain, the conversations became more difficult and, one day, Jim told Yasmin that he preferred to speak alone with his father. He could not bear being overheard speaking to him as if to a child. Yasmin understood. The embarrassment was less for himself than for the man his father had become.

  Jim treasured his self-possession, a quality Yasmin found attractive even though it made him wary of domestic discord, which she found less so. Disagreement at home disconcerted him. Home was the place to which he retreated, to rest, recuperate, nurse his grudges. He never forgot a professional slight and would, over time, seek out weaknesses, seizing the first opportunity, even years later, for retaliation. Forgiveness, she had learnt, did not come easily to him.

  Yet he was not a difficult man to live with: his disposition was hardest on himself. At work, his reputation was that of a friendly man with bite. At home, though, he would disarm rift with a quick apology, giving way more easily than Yasmin would have liked.

  Disagreement was, for her, an invitation to discussion, less an opportunity for proving herself right than for being shown flaws in her logic, omissions in her information. She was open to convincing. But Jim was not adept at such strategy. He rarely tried, and when he did it was with a barely concealed peevishness that served only to heighten tension.

  She wondered at times how much he cared: Did the domestic matter less to him than the professional? Or was it that the domestic mattered so much that he feared engaging a path that could, if followed to its logical conclusion, lead to irreparable schism? — as it so often had in his business dealings. She glimpsed at such times the insecurities he shared with her in carefully apportioned pieces — fears that remained unresolved within him like a hidden paralysis.

  His coffee cup sat half empty beside him, the coffee no longer steaming. He turned the newspaper pages briskly, his scanning eyes barely focusing on the words before them.

  After leafing through the sports section — he checked the hockey scores almost as a reflex — Jim said, “D’you know, my parents never used to fight. Then the summer before I headed off to university they had a huge one.”

  “Stormy days in the Summerhayes household? Unimaginable, if you know what I mean.” Yasmin let a faint smile shape her lips: It wasn’t that he was predictable so much as that she had learned to read his signs.

  “Oh, they never raised their voices. It was a fight of silences. You know — whispers and rattling china.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Money. I think. I was never quite sure, to tell you the truth. They felt it wasn’t any of my business. One day, out of the blue, my dad left home. He found himself a little apartment downtown. Then a few months later he was back, again out of the blue.”

  “And your mom?”

  “She made him dinner. As if he’d never left.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I never knew — I mean, you can never tell —”

  “What?”

  “Where things’ll end up. You know.”

  Over in the corner, Anubis arose, elongating, and with a single bound, leapt curling into Jim’s lap.

  Jim chuckled, ran a hand along the silky fur.

  Yasmin saw sparks fly past his fingers.

  7

  PENNY HAS LEFT word with Amie that she will be back before lunch; has left in her absence a sense of quiescence.

  Cyril — out somewhere, Amie says unsmiling, looking after something or looking for something to do — has left no word.

  Then Amie returns to the kitchen and begins, with a discreet rustling, the preparation of Yasmin’s breakfast.

  Yasmin takes her coffee from the drinking table, from the same place set for her at lunch and a quick dinner yesterday, and steps out through the open double doors onto the porch.

  It is a cloudy morning, the vegetation a rich moist green, stretching off to hills hazy with mist. She hears, from somewhere far off, the sounds of rhythmic chopping.

  She realizes with a touch of surprise that she has not dreamt — or at least that she has had no dreams disturbing or pleasurable enough to be memorable. She has, she thinks, slept with her defence up, images restrained, their betrayals surfacing only through the door half opened by drowsiness. No dreams, then, but summoned mirages more potent.

  “Breakfas’ ready, miss,” Amie calls from the dining room.

  She turns and with a smile says, “You can call me Yasmin.”

  Amie seems to consider this for a moment. Then she says, “Yes, miss. Breakfas’ ready.”

  Yasmin steps inside, into the greater shadows of the unlit dining room. “Don’t you like me, Amie?”

  The question surprises Amie, confuses her.

  Yasmin decides not to offer relief. She stands still, waiting for an answer. And as she does in difficult interviews, counts silently: a thousand and one, a thousand and two …

  Five seconds of silence.

  Then, with no papers to shuffle, she takes her seat, wondering, as she never does before the cameras, whether she is being cruel: decides that she is, and puts Amie at ease with another smile, one that suggests that she is merely teasing.

  On the plate in front of her are two slices of fried bread, and an egg fried hard swimming in butter.

  Yasmin says, “Amie, d’you know what cholesterol is?”

  “You use to eat this every mornin’ when you was small-small.”

  Yasmin goes still. A space opens up in her mind. “Did you know me well when I was a kid?”

  “Who you think change your nappies? Gave you breakfas’, lunch, dinner.”

  “You were my babysitter.”

  “Babysitter. Nurse. I always been the maid, miss.” She turns and glides back into the kitchen.

  Babysitter. Nurse. Maid. Forty years: Yasmin feels her head spin with the airlessness of Amie’s life.

  8

  AT ONE POINT in his career — early on, when this kind of thing had its place — my husband liked to talk about our people as being crushed, oppressed, humiliated, that kind of thing. It was a favourite theme and he often reached for it during speeches — so he once confessed to me — not so much because he believed in it as because it was a guaranteed crowd pleaser. People love being told how oppressed they are, did you know that, Mrs. Livingston? It’s like expiation, you see. It lifts all responsibility for their misery from their shoulders: it is his fault, that fellow over there, the one with the white skin or the black skin or the hooked nose or the plummy accent, he’s the one who’s doing it to me. That was one reason people loved him. He absolved them of everything, by naming others …

  Did he know what he was doing? Of course he did. They all did. They were just playing the game as it was played back then — and still is. Stirring people’s fears, pricking their sensitivities — and where there were none, creating them.

  Yes, you heard what I said: creating them. And why should that make me cynical, my dear? Perhaps it’s less a question of my cynicism than of your naïveté? I don’t know the half of it, I assure you. I was hardly his confessor or his sounding board. He spoke to me only occasionally, you see, late at night in bed, when his brain would not stop.

  Little incidents were best, he believed, because they were hard to verify and provided a basis of fact, which was all you needed or wanted, for that matter. He wasn’t terribly interested in what you might call literal truth — but political truth, now that was another matter …

  Once, I recall, an opportunity came to him to stir things up a bit. There had been a fight at a rum shop between a black man and one of our people over the correct interpretation of a cricket rule. It ended unhappily for the black fellow. There was some blood, some broken bones. The Indian fellow was arrested. My husband was looking for a cause to raise the political temperature a bit — he believed in keeping things at a low boil — and he seriously considered defending this man in what he called the court of public opinion …


  What argument could he have made? My dear Mrs. Livingston, any argument he pleased. It was all in the presentation, don’t you see? The fellow was provoked. The fellow was humiliated. And there were those who say the fellow was called the vilest of racist names! Nothing needed to be substantiated. As it turned out, he made a speech about the incident in which he said that, after having examined the facts, he could not bring himself — as many were urging him — to defend the fellow. He even wished the black fellow well. Hah! A simple artistry, really: he used them both to exonerate himself of the charge of racial politics. Oh, his politics were racial all right, but the perception was unhelpful. Better to deny it.

  That was my husband’s genius, you see. He could be reasonable and conciliatory, or he could be a rabble-rouser. He could ignite fires or extinguish them at will …

  The truth? To people like my husband literal truth is interesting but not often useful. Political truth is far more valuable, the possible truths my husband was playing with, for instance. My husband, you see, Mrs. Livingston, put thought into everything. He took nothing for granted. Except me.

  9

  AN INVENTIVE MAN. Adventurous.

  And yet.

  And yet there came the afternoon when Jim interrupted the sorting of his books to place the blanket, freshly laundered and wrapped in plastic, beside the sliding door.

  She pretended not to see. The gesture was so calculated, so uninspired. The sight of the blanket lying there on the carpet, given purpose, no longer an object of spontaneity, left her with a hollow feeling, her body contracted, as if pulling, saddened, into itself.