Waiting for Tomorrow

by Nathacha Appanah

  The girl—her name is Julie, she was sixteen at the time—added that Ben tucked the cigarette behind his ear, shook hands with her, and drove off with Vicky at 9:40. No one would ever see them alive again.

  At 9:40 I was just a back bent over a sheet of paper in complete silence and I wasn’t thinking about them. At noon, when I opened my bag on a bench in the shade of a big leafy bush I don’t know the name of, I discovered a little note from Ben in my lunch box. It was written in a slightly shaky hand, as if he’d been hesitant. But it was very simple: I have faith in you, good luck. No signature. No I love you, no darling. A solemn note that the police kept for long weeks before returning it to me crumpled and slightly torn on the right-hand corner.

  I emerged from the hall at 3:20 and was overcome with a wonderfully giddy feeling. It was over, I was hungry, I was thirsty, I felt fine, I was knocked out. I no longer had anything left to prove. I walked lightly along to the very spot where Ben and Vicky had dropped me off. Once I got there I looked at my watch, it was 3:27. It started to rain and I opened my umbrella. The rain fell much harder, it was like uncooked rice falling in an empty cooking pot.

  Now a dark road opens up before me where I wait, I spy, I survey, I start, I feel my way, I surmise, I lose my temper, I speculate, I become convinced, I lie to myself, I’m in denial, I fall over, I get up again, I presume, I act, I undo, I curse, I beg, I pray, I supplicate, I yell, I weep, and when, on the following Tuesday at 10:30, the police officer informs me that two bodies have been found in a white Fiat at the foot of the cliff near the lighthouse I start to picture things.

  Their car on the old bumpy road. The solitary houses here and there, the cane fields, the tall eucalyptuses, the peacock trees, the cactuses, a doughnut stall, a stall selling yellow and red fruits. Instead of turning off to the left to go down to the sea, they take the right fork toward the lighthouse. Since we’re here, why not take a look at this relic from the nineteenth century? Why not tell his son about the days long ago when they fired cannon balls, when ships sank in the open sea, when a man lived at the top of that staircase with its two hundred and twenty-three steps? It’s a dreary dirt road flanked by thorn bushes. It had been raining all week and there’s heavy, oozing mud that sticks to the wheels.

  “Are we going to get there soon?”

  “Yes, we’re nearly there. It’s just around the next bend. Can you hear the waves?”

  I imagine it’s some tiny thing that decides it. A glance at the little boy who’s beginning to find the wait too long. A bend taken too sharply to the right. A steering wheel not responding quickly enough. The earth giving way and the white car sliding into the void. The waves cover up the shouts and the noise of the metal crashing onto the rocks. A wall of rain hurtles down now and rapidly erases their tracks. Sometimes I think back over all that. Not without grief. Not without tears. I’m on my bed and I can see the pine trees silhouetted against the dusk. The sky becomes tinged with pink, with orange, and sometimes there’s a kind of rush of purple before the darkness envelops everything. Now I can offer Melody a calm welcome, as I now welcome the night [as this new family welcomes me]. When I remember that cigarette Ben bought and tucked behind his ear, I just hope he had time to smoke it. I like to think that on the very day of his death he wanted to try something new, as living people do.

  PART THREE

  The first day of winter

  CHRISTMAS IS ONLY A FEW DAYS AWAY but winter has not yet arrived. The weather is gray, damp, and autumnal. Only the main streets and the boulevard beside the sea are decorated with garlands and electric snowflakes. On some afternoons there are still people surfing, and a few cafés have kept tables out on their terraces. This Wednesday morning the people getting off the buses and out of their cars are all hoping for something to happen at last; a touch of frost, a snowstorm, carol singing in the town square, a Christmas market with people selling mulled wine and toffee apples.

  Adam’s office is located in one of the little streets sloping down into the town center. It is early still but he has a full day ahead. He has just left a painting carefully wrapped in brown paper for room 218 at the big hotel on the seafront. He asked for a receipt. At 10:00 he is due to visit the site for what will be the biggest aquatic center in the region with the director of conurbation planning services and the project manager. The project jointly submitted by Adam’s firm and another local one had been accepted scarcely a month before—a site three thousand yards square, wood heating, sauna, steam baths, Olympic pool, outdoor pool, giant chutes. The work is due to start next March and will take three years. The site is half an hour’s drive from the city center, straddling a former industrial wasteland and a piece of farmland where only a few months ago there were fields of corn that reached to Adam’s shoulder. If he has lunch on the way he should be back by 2:00 p.m. at the latest.

  At 3:00 he is due to meet David Schtourm, the gallery owner, in the bar of the hotel. At 6:00 he has a training session with Imran. After that they will both go back to the house for a bite to eat and drink. Adèle will provide samosas. Anita has already bought the champagne.

  Adam stops and takes a deep breath. That’s better, he’s no longer shaking at the idea of his meeting with David Schtourm, he no longer feels sick, his face is no longer plagued with nervous twitches. The gallery owner is a man who looks astonishingly like Ralph Lauren: small, gray hair, piercing blue eyes, checked shirts, his hands often in the pockets of his jeans, leather shoes with pointed toes. The list of artists he has discovered and supported is dizzying and his reputation is that of a formidable, respected, and exacting man. He has galleries in Paris, London, New York, Dubai, and Hong Kong. During the past few years he has devoted himself a great deal to contemporary art but he continues to exhibit the work of painters in traditional style whom he mysteriously unearths at all four corners of the globe and who, once they are with him, see their careers taking off like a rocket.

  It is such a simple story that Adam himself sometimes finds it hard to believe. At the start of the year a business syndicate had acquired the top hotel in the city, built in 1885, and in the spring had requested bids for its renovation. The mayor of the city and David Schtourm were invited to sit on the jury. Even though his firm is too small for works on this scale, Adam had nevertheless submitted a plan and illustrated his submission with a transparency of one of the paintings from his new series. His submission was not accepted, but David Schtourm noted the illustration and wanted to know the name of the painter, and that is how Adam is now due to meet him. It was as simple as that.

  When he reaches number seven Adam pauses for a moment in front of the big window through which one can see the well-ordered desk of Graziella, the firm’s secretary, and that of Louis, the trainee, a first-year architectural student. Adam works in the office at the back, which has a French window leading out into a little concrete-floored courtyard, with four chairs, a table, and a big camellia in a pot on the ground. The lights in the office are on but there is no one there. Adam looks at the models exhibited in the display window and several before and after photographs of houses he has redesigned. He smiles at the Christmas tree made of flotsam that Anita had bought the previous year from a Congolese artist living in the mountains about whom she had written an article. The strips from Coca-Cola cans glitter, the stars fashioned from old lengths of cassette tape revolve gently. It is a clean, well-lit window display, but this morning it has a somewhat old-fashioned and melancholy aura. At this precise moment, when the clock on the city hall is about to strike the half for 8:30, what remains from all those years of work?

  Adam has become an architect for swimming pools, conference centers, gyms, and for the local bourgeoisie. At what moment did he abandon his dreams of designing a church, a museum, a memorial? If he had not taken to painting in the secrecy of his studio, if he had given up his obsession with colors, textures, and shapes, if he had devoted all his energy and ambition to his profession, would he have become a different man, a different arch
itect? Might he have opened an office in Paris? Might he be coming back here now merely to “move into the slow lane” and, as they say, “renew contact with the simple life” in the provinces? He suddenly thinks back, again rather wistfully, to his first years in Paris, before he met Anita. Just as his wife said she felt she was regarded as a “typical foreigner” at the cocktail parties she went to with him, so he himself felt he was viewed as a “typical provincial,” with his local accent, his ungainly appearance, his local traditions, his cheese.

  The light changes and Adam catches sight of his own reflection. A tall figure, stooping a little toward the window, his arms crossed over his blue parka, an old leather bag slung across his shoulder, a hazy face, much of it covered by a beard. He has a surge of affection for himself, as if for an animal that is growing old, and feeling a little lost. He uncrosses his arms and thrusts his hands into his pockets, and his fingers encounter the receipt given to him by the receptionist at the hotel that morning. Adam holds himself straight. Maybe today will be a wonderful day.

  He sees Louis and Graziella returning, each carrying a cup of coffee. Adam goes into the building. “Good morning, good morning, I’m late,” he says, to excuse his lack of enthusiasm for early-morning small talk. He dives into his office, closes the door.

  An hour later Graziella knocks.

  “Adam? Monsieur Clément’s secretary has just called. He’s got flu. He can’t be on site this morning.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “I’m afraid so. He’s been in bed since yesterday.”

  “Damn! I’ll call the project manager directly. Anything else, Graziella?”

  “There’s someone in reception for you, a Monsieur … hmm, wait, I’ve written it down. A Monsieur … Imam.”

  “An imam wants to see me?”

  “No, his name is Imam. He says it’s a personal matter.”

  “Ah! Im-ran, Graziella. For heaven’s sake, it’s quite simple really.”

  She laughs, as if she had never before heard anything so funny in her life. Adam remembers a conversation between Graziella and Louis he had overheard a few months before, and the remark: Well, what do you expect, his wife’s from Mauritius. That evening he had told Anita about it, as it had struck him as a compliment, a little as if he had heard them saying: What do you expect? His wife is a top model! What do you expect? His wife is a Nobel Prize winner. But Anita, as was increasingly frequent, had hit the roof. What’s that supposed to mean? Is that some kind of flaw? A kind of fetish? Or a sickness that causes you to love only women with dark skin? Women from islands? Or, as you used to say, “women of color”?

  Why did she take it like that? What caused this anger? Anita was becoming so susceptible, so touchy, so, yes, disagreeable, sometimes. If anyone asked her where she came from, she took it badly. If she was asked questions about her native land she would retort that she was not employed by the tourist office. How could she expect other people to overlook her color, her distinctive nature?

  When they were younger (all this seems an eternity ago to Adam, days when they slept on a mattress on the floor, talked for hours, made love every day, lived off pizza and processed cheese), they had often talked about working together, creating an original artistic project. They dreamed of being the very model of an artistic couple, mysterious, talented, and in love, they hoped to find a new way of combining words, painting, form, color, narrative.

  Could Adèle somehow be that project? Anita is writing her story, he is painting the same story, or at least what that story evokes in him. A sudden anguish causes a tightening in Adam’s stomach. What were they going to do with that text, with those paintings? How had all this taken on the form of a secret? Not a day passes without Adam longing to puncture the abscess: all it would take would be to sit down with Adèle and tell her everything. In simple language. Adèle, your story has inspired us to write a novel, to paint pictures.

  But they had never found a way of doing this and, somehow or other, it is too late now. The novel is under way, the pictures have been painted.

  Imran is squatting in front of the Christmas tree. He gets up when he hears Adam, but continues looking at the tree, his hands on his hips, a posture that makes him look effeminate and childish at the same time. Adam has a momentary vision of a young lad with thick dark hair moving forward toward the starting line, his arm held out straight before him, his body slightly stooped. Adam could tell Imran. He would understand, or at least would try to understand how Adam has gotten out of his depth with the paintings, with Anita’s words, with Adèle. Imran would tell him how to extricate himself from this situation, just as he gives him advice about running, about breathing, about his footwork. Imran would not judge him.

  “Hi there, Adam. Is that a Christmas tree? It looks as if it’s been made out of Coca-Cola cans.”

  “That’s exactly it, Imran. How’s things?”

  “It’s pretty weird, isn’t it? I don’t say it’s ugly, but why would anyone make stuff like that?”

  “I guess it’s a personal interpretation.”

  “So, how about you? Do you think it’s beautiful? I guess you do. You put it up in your office.”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Hmm. Anyway, where do you buy stuff like that?”

  “It was Anita who unearthed it.”

  “I’ll bet it was. Has she written a manifesto for the preservation of Coca-Cola cans to go with it?”

  “You can ask her tonight. Would you like a drink of something?”

  “A coffee, if you’ve got time. I don’t want to hold you up.”

  “Come along.”

  They are standing out in the little courtyard and Adam notices that Graziella has brought the camellia in under cover. Imran drinks his coffee slowly. It is the first time he has come to see Adam in his office and he is exhausted after walking here, exhausted by all the feelings that have been gnawing at him for more than a month and exhausted by having had to repeat his name several times to the secretary. In the old days he could have been amused by such things but he has no energy left for this. He looks at the chairs, imagines sitting on one, resting his forehead on the iron table, forgetting the weariness, the petty irritations, the pain.

  Adam and Imran have known one another for a long time. As boys they used to go to the same sports club and they had more or less the same recorded times in cross-country races and the half marathon. They would run one behind the other, their sneakers filthy, their legs spattered with mud, their faces bathed in sweat. They never spoke, but now they like to think they were keeping an eye on one another.

  “What’s going on, Imran? Is everything okay? You’re very pale.”

  Every Wednesday he and Adam train together, encourage one another, improve their recorded times. Then they spend a little while together for a drink or a meal. They talk about their families, their work, the passage of time, on which they are, perhaps, losing ground. It is a simple friendship, with no frills, just like the sport they both love. But recently Imran has seemed distracted, his recorded times are bad, he says he feels nauseous, preoccupied by his work. He is a mathematics teacher at a lycée on the edge of the city. Those kids, he says simply. This is enough to paint a nightmare picture, featuring six-foot adolescents who have no use for a math problem and refer to their teacher as “the Taliban” or “Massud,” on account of his Afghan origin. He has not even put his name down for the half marathon at the end of February, excusing himself by saying he forgot (those kids).

  “Imran? You really worry me.”

  Imran peers down into his coffee cup then he looks up at his friend and says softly: “Adam, I’ve got cancer.”

  A little later a man can be seen weaving his way fast through the city streets. Instinctively he seeks the sunlight, he feels cold, he is surprised by the pale, icy look of things. So winter arrived while he was at his office, maybe at the very moment when Imran was sitting down and telling him everything. Adam is thirty-nine. He needs to get back home, he needs t
o hug his wife and daughter tightly, he needs to forget everything he has heard this morning, he needs someone to reassure him, to give him a guarantee, someone to make him a promise, swear an oath, yes, you’re going to live a long time, no, your body will not become your enemy, yes, your family will live forever, yes, your house will stand forever.

  Adam drives fast and only realizes once the car has stopped outside the house that he has left his parka, his cell phone, and his shoulder bag behind. The kitchen door is open. What day is it? What did Anita say at breakfast that morning?

  “Anita?”

  There is indeed a woman sitting at the kitchen table, but it is not his wife, it is Adèle. She turns her head toward him and looks at him as if she were expecting him. Seeing her, he is reminded of Dutch interior paintings, a Vermeer, for example, a scene of domestic life, her flawless brown skin, her face turned toward him, her frank look, her lips hinting at a barely perceptible smile, her perfectly formed skull, her hands, repeatedly coming together and then separating in a graceful movement, the left hand tipping peas into the transparent bowl, the right dropping the empty pods onto a little green pile. Why does the presence in the kitchen of a woman other than his wife not surprise him? He ought to turn around, go back to his car, return to his office, do what he has to do, and stop acting like a child who needs to be comforted.

  But Adèle is precisely what is right for him at this moment. Anita would have asked hundreds of questions, she would have been shocked that Imran has bone cancer, she would have wanted to know why such things happen to good people, she would have wanted to do something, telephone Imran, make him come over this evening, as arranged, go and see him, get him to talk, write an article on the subject, she would have clenched her fists as if it were happening to herself and she would have ended up making this “cause” her own, for with Anita, by that stage in the conversation, it would have become a “cause.”