by Adam Roberts
‘A who?’ I was in bed, reading.
‘A writer, you know. Last century, I think.’
‘Oh,’ I said, not much interested.
‘Didn’t he write Call of the Wild?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, vaguely.
‘Or was it Claw of the Wild? Jack London’s Claw of the Wild?’
‘That,’ I said. ‘Or the other title. It sounds familiar.’
The little scratching noise of bristles rubbing over military cloth.
[Blank] cleared his throat. ‘Is he, like, a relation? A family member – ancestor?’
I laughed at this. ‘Why on earth would you think so?’
He looked a little hurt. ‘You know – your surname.’
‘London’s not my surname,’ I said. ‘London’s where I come from.’
A twenty-second pause.
‘Like,’ he said, working carefully over an epaulette, ‘the immigrant thing.’
‘Immigrant,’ I said. ‘That’s me.’
His voice acquired a cautious, downward inflection. ‘So – what’s your actual surname?’
‘Bojani Sahai,’ I said. I didn’t give it a second thought.
Crow scoffed. ‘What sort of name sounds like that?’
‘An Indian name,’ I said.
‘Chief Sitting Cow,’ he said, and laughed in little noises like hiccoughs. ‘Don’t joke, though. What’s your surname – really?’
‘Not American Indian. Indian.’
Another twenty seconds. The toothbrush scrub had stopped. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘We’re married now. I don’t understand.’
‘What’s not to understand?’
‘You’re, like, Indian?’
‘Sure.’
Crow was looking intently at me. ‘But you’re white.’
‘I’ve been out of the sun a long time,’ I said. ‘Give me a month of good sunshine and I’ll brown up nice and tasty.’
‘You’re black?’ he said, his voice still non-comprehending.
‘Brown,’ I said, cross. ‘Or black if you like.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.
‘Look—’ I started to say, my temper rising.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘You can’t be black – brown, whatever. Brown skin just doesn’t, you know, change to white. Black guys don’t go white in winter.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I tan, like you. Only maybe a little deeper, that’s all.’
‘I can’t get past this,’ said Crow. ‘You’re black?’
‘I’m,’ I said, fiercely, ‘brown, and what’s the problem with that? Is that not allowed in the NUSA or something?’ I said, my voice hardening.
‘Jesus,’ he said, his most extreme expletive. He stood up. He looked rather angry. ‘You’re joking – you – right? A joke, yeah? Look at [Blank]’ (one of Crow’s lieutenants), ‘he’s black as beetroot, and he hasn’t been sunbathing any more than you have.’
‘Black as beetroot?’ I said, unable to keep the mocking tone away from my words.
Crow’s face darkened with an angry blush. ‘As eggplant, I meant to say. As eggplant. Don’t avoid the god-heck-it question.’
I got out of bed, and faced up to Crow. ‘What is this?’ I screeched. ‘You’re interrogating me, now? What sort of racist [expletive deleted] is this?’
‘You married me under false pretences,’ he blustered.
‘You married me,’ I said. I had lost my cool by this time. ‘I was the [expletive deleted] goods and you purchased me. What, you want to change your mind now? Is that it?’
‘You never told me you were – uh, a woman of colour.’
‘I never knew you were the sort of racist [expletive deleted] for whom it mattered. Anyway,’ I said, throwing my arms up and stalking round the bed, ‘anyway, what kind of a [expletive deleted] is that to say? I never told you I was black? – look at me! You looked at me, and you liked what you saw. And how has that changed now? Because my surname’s Sahai not [expletive deleted] London? Because you pronounce my surname differently you suddenly don’t want me any more?’ I was dressing now, clumsily, determined to march out, to walk out on him for ever, although I had no idea where I was going.
‘Now,’ Crow was saying. ‘Settle down, settle down. It’s just a shock, you know, finding out like this. You know? You’d be shocked if I told you I was black, all of a sudden, wouldn’t you?’
‘You’re the whitest man in the world,’ I told him, vehemently.
‘Just settle down,’ said Crow, coming over to me and putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘Just get back into bed and settle down and let’s talk about this.’
That was our conversation on the subject of colour.
I fumed and huffed around, calling him some more names, but there was no point in me storming out dramatically. Where would I have gone? Crow put his uniform away, went through to the bathroom and didn’t come out for a long time. When he re-emerged he looked no different, except for a sort of flush over his neck and up to his ears. We went out together and had supper together in the mess, and he was his forced-jolly self. But everything had changed.
We had by then been married a month, and every single night of that month, without a single exception, we had had (as he might put it) marital congress. There had been a quaintly military flavour to it: we’d go to bed, and the light would be turned out, and we’d both lie on our backs not touching, not speaking. But I could feel his muscles tense, the miniature vibrations transmitted through the material of the mattress, as he prepared with painful obviousness to ambush me. The unspoken notion that he was taking me by surprise was so transparent, and therefore so preposterous, that it was almost endearing. So he would lie still, lie still, and then suddenly flex his body and twitch himself round and get on top of me. Then it would all be happening at once: he’d be kissing my mouth and chin and neck (he was shorter than I was) with a rapid padding motion, urgent and yet oddly restrained, as if he were holding back – think of an overly lipsticked woman kissing tissue paper to remove the excess. At the same time his right hand would be thrust between my legs, his fingers working me, the muscles of that arm palpably tensing and pulsing, pressing into my belly and across my chest, his finger [text deleted]. He would not say so much as a single word, but he would inevitably go through a series of set-piece physical movements. At precisely the halfway point he would grip my hips firmly with his hands and turn me over. A few minutes from the end he would repeat this procedure, put me again on my back, start kissing my face and chin and neck again, and pull my knees up. [text deleted]. His pushing motions would become abruptly more rapid. Then it would be all finished, and he would pull away to lie on his back again, breathing a little more deeply. There was never, in our time together, any discussion of sex – neither preliminary discussion to establish preferences, nor after-sex anatomisings of what we’d just been doing. Certainly there was no indication that he wanted me to play a more active role. I don’t believe he did. And as for me, I didn’t mind. Perhaps that sounds like a rather crushing judgement for a woman to make of a man, I didn’t mind. That’s not what a man wants to hear, I suppose: he wants to hear I moaned, I loved it, the earth moved. But I didn’t mind was how I felt. It was by no means the best, but equally certainly not the worst sex I had ever known. I didn’t mind. Some nights I was even quite into it, not because of the sex itself, maybe, but just because of the luxurious laziness of absolute passivity – of not being expected to initiate, to twist and throw my body around, and most particularly the complete lack of pressure to simulate any enjoyment, all that operatic panting and gasping. And in that not uncomfortable void of expectation, that play-acting of submission, I sometimes even discovered some sparkles of pleasure myself. I’ve no especial yen towards submission, I’ve never had fantasies of being dominated, never gone for that S&M scene. It wasn’t that, that was not where the liberation lay. Rather it was that Crow, instinctively or otherwise, took away all the constraints that make sex a performance. In thi
s one arena he did not ask me to pretend in any way.
But after we had our conversation about colour the sex stopped. That night I lay on my back, waiting, and [Blank] lay next to me, tensed up and motionless. But the pounce did not come, and after a little while I turned and shuffled myself into a sleeping posture on my side. And sleep settled on me like snow falling until I was buried in it and far away.
The next morning he strode around the apartment like a spring-heeled man, clearing his throat mightily, bouncing up and down and stretching his arms out in front of him with his palms out and his fingers interlaced. ‘Gotta get on, today,’ he told me, with a brightness so forced it was nearly metallic. ‘Things to do, things to do.’ And he positively marched out of the flat.
The next salient, as it were, was when he announced between mouthfuls of supper that he wanted us to sleep in separate beds. But although my memory wants to flip forward to that moment, I would be glossing over a whole long stretch of time. Was it as long as two whole months? Part of me thinks it can’t be, can’t be so long, but I rather think it was. Sixty days. Sixty nights, more to the point, of lying next to me in bed in the darkness with every muscle in his body tensed up, as if he were a stage strongman and was holding himself prepared to receive a punch in the stomach from a member of the audience. Was it sixty nights? How could he have persevered so heroically in his physical withdrawal and unease? I can’t put myself, imaginatively, into his place. I just can’t do it. Wouldn’t you relax, despite yourself, after a few nights? Wouldn’t the seepage of ordinary life erode your principled stand? Let’s say – and I can’t even go so far as to suggest that this was truly the process going on inside Crow’s mind, but let’s, for argument’s sake, say – that he felt aggrieved, tricked, that what he had assumed to be pure revealed itself tainted, that a marrow-deep physical revulsion was blended with a sense of wounded honour. His white wife had been stolen away and replaced by a black wife he found repellent. Even if that was how he felt, how long could he cling on to such wilfulness? Set on one side the purely mental idea, the symbolic signifier of whiteness, or of blackness; set on the other all the myriad actual touches, a caress, a hug, of conversations and differences of opinion, the myriad joys and comforts of companionship, of a smile on the face of the person you are talking to, of irises and pupils (that mean so much in human communication and which are the same range of colours the whole world over – in fact, pupils are the same actual colour the whole world over, and that colour is black), not to mention the sexual release, which was obviously something important to him. Doesn’t one side so wholly outweigh the other?
It seems so to me.
But nevertheless we lived that life, that freezing up of personal relations, and I think it did indeed last two full months before the first crack shot across the frozen surface with the pattern of lightning striking. He acted colder and colder, though he expressed this coldness through a frosty brightness like sun on snow. ‘Good morning good morning,’ he would say as we took breakfast together. Always the double greeting, as if the second utterance cancelled out the first, sine mixing with cosine to leave no actual greeting at all at the start of the day. ‘Busy day today, yes indeed,’ he would say, briskly, bolting his morning pasta in his hurry to be out the door and away from me. ‘Back late, back late.’
And gone.
And then one evening we were enjoying a meal of meat – rare pleasure. It was tinned meatballs, half a dozen each, like eyeballs that had shrunk as they rotted brown and slimy. We had bread too, and that was a luxury item, though I think it’s more common nowadays. It was pasta-bread rather than real bread, which is to say dried pasta ground down to use as flour and then baked up with water and yeast. But I can no longer remember what real bread tastes like. The city had a supply of four hundred thousand tonnes of dried pasta, mined out of a supply somewhere far below us, so pasta was the meal that month.
He slid the prongs of his fork very carefully into one meatball, and lifted it to the level of his eyes, moving it very slowly as if it were an enormous weight. This, I could see, was his externalisation of ‘thinking’, a sort of dumbshow to me that he was revolving ideas in his head. He examined the meatball for a little while, placed it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed.
‘You know,’ he said, and I knew with those words that something serious was about to be said, because they were uttered in a level tone of voice, and without the pressured brightness of his usual conversational manner.
I looked at him.
‘You know, I think we should maybe have separate beds. In fact,’ he added with a hurried emphasis, as if urgently cutting off my shocked protests, although I had not made a sound, ‘in fact, in fact, I’ve decided it. I’ve decided it. It’d be better for you, nee-ah-aw’ (a sort of mewling noise), ‘would, it would, really. You’d sleep better, I’d—’ and he laughed briefly ‘—I’d sleep better. It’s the whole sleeping better thing, you know.’
He stopped, and looked at me.
‘OK,’ I said.
He blinked both eyes in unison once, twice. ‘We can,’ he said, ‘still sleep in the same room.’ It was, I think, a concession that he had been prepared to grant me after prolonged argument, and which was startled out of him by the immediacy of my capitulation.
‘OK,’ I said again.
His face darkened a little as if growing angry, but his tone of voice remained plain. ‘Or not, if you’d prefer. Whatever you’d prefer. Separate rooms, maybe.’ He ate another meatball with studied slowness. Then another. I was waiting for him to say something else, but he was silent for the rest of the meal. I think I would have preferred it if he had said something. Maybe: ‘it’s nothing to do with me finding out you’re black.’ I don’t believe I would have challenged this, had he said it. I don’t believe I would even have contradicted him (‘oh let’s be honest with one another, of course it is’ and so on). But at least it would have meant that an actual, active point of view would have been established, planted like a flagpole. Even had he said something brutal, like ‘I can’t [expletive deleted] you now I think you’re Indian’, I think I would have been happier. But with nothing said, the dynamic between us was nebulous, sticky and unformed as melted ice cream, and I was nagged by the sense that I had missed something important, that there was some crucial fact that I was stupidly overlooking. Maybe it had nothing to do with my race. Maybe it was something else driving him from me that I just could not see. As I thought about it I didn’t truly believe this, but I couldn’t quite rid myself of that suspicion. It nagged, as the cliché says suspicions do: but it really nagged, it chided away in the back of my mind.
That night Crow rolled himself in a blanket and slept in the dining room under the table. The following day a couple of his subalterns, or whatever they’re called in the NUSA marines, brought in some sticks and some short planks and assembled a bed. We no longer used the room as a dining room then, and took to eating in the kitchen – still together, mostly, but often without saying anything. On the other hand, sometimes we would say things to one another. And on occasion our conversations would be quite animated and even cosy. Once, much later, he kissed me: a touch on the cheek that turned into a drawing together of our four lips, into a single circle. It was nice. It was wonderful, actually. And he didn’t yank himself away, or hurry off muttering, or anything like that. But the kiss stopped, and we talked some more, and he went through and lay on his bed and rolled himself tightly in a blanket and went to sleep. It was strange.
No, I must be exact. Our life together became a less traumatic but more sterile sort of thing than perhaps I am implying. There was no great tension, no drama, no fuming suppressed racial hatred. It was more a sort of antiseptic going-through-motions. It was frustrating. From time to time my temper would leave me, and I’d yell at him that he was racist, that he was gay, that he was stupid and idiotic, all the random noise that comes flying from a person’s forge when their temperature is up and the hammer of anger is clattering down. But it is
hard to argue, properly to argue, with somebody who is not engaging with you. He could wear down my explosions by applying a constant drip of ‘calm down’s, or ‘hey’s, and perhaps hug me until I stopped. He could be very tender.
He wasn’t sleeping well, I could tell, but there was no communication between us of that sort, no ‘Tira, I have nightmares’ or anything like that. I could tell he was having nightmares, nevertheless. Every morning there were bags slung under his eyes, like tiny smiles. He stumbled into the furniture, backing off with a sucked-in breath and a frozen grin. In the night I sometimes heard him gasping in his sleep, or heard his truckle bed creak and creak as he writhed on it. Still, what could I do? It wasn’t my call. Did he go to the officer’s mess and drink a tiny shot glass of wine (for alcohol was very hard to come by, even for the most senior people) with his fellow officers, and blub about it? I don’t know. She broke my heart, I loved her, she tricked me, she whited herself up somehow, but she’s a nigger underneath, I’m not racist, you know I’m not racist, but I just can’t do it with an Indian woman, I just can’t, it’s not something I can help. And the brother officers would place precise, sharp, manly slaps on his shoulder, and murmur their support. I can picture the scene, but that doesn’t mean it actually happened. Maybe he said nothing to anybody. That was more his way. It’s even possible, though I find this harder to comprehend, but it’s possible that he didn’t even say anything to himself. We don’t know what it looks like, do we, the inside of another person’s head. We try to read faces, but faces are not windows. They’re more like clouds of unknowing, the features forming temporarily in the transient flesh like cloud-shapes and then passing away, and inside holding rainstorms or maybe nothing at all. Perhaps his mind was an utterly alien thing. Wouldn’t that be ironic, in the light of what later happened?