Blood Kin

by Ceridwen Dovey

  ‘Did you fall for her?’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘For the President’s wife.’

  ‘Of course not. I loved my wife. I love my wife.’

  ’So she was too old for your liking too.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  We turn a corner in the passageway and find the barber leaning heavily on the railings, staring down into the courtyard. The Commander offers him his other arm. The barber looks at the man trailing behind us a few steps, decides it’s not worth making a fuss, and reluctantly lets the Commander hook his arm beneath his. He stands, rigid, willing himself not to be repulsed. We continue on our walk, a stiff three-legged race in slow motion, until we arrive at our bedroom door.

  The Commander turns to me. ‘I’d like you to start tomorrow on a portrait. And you’ll cut my hair tomorrow afternoon,’ he says to the barber. He drops our arms suddenly like two sacks of flour he has carried as a burden and walks briskly away.

  ‘Come,’ says the barber from inside the room. ‘I’ll show you how to unpinch that nerve.’

  I close the door behind me.

  ‘Lie down – no, on the floor, not your bed. You need a hard surface for this to work.’

  I ease myself slowly towards the floorboards. He stands above me, his beard an upside-down halo.

  ‘Now bend your right leg and pull it across your left leg. You should hear your spine click.’

  I wish it were that simple. He is young, this barber, and optimistic. He must be in his late twenties. I haven’t asked him anything about his life; all three of us have been in siege mode, thinking only of our own survival, unwilling to form a bond that might implicate us further. My mind has been full of my wife, my own pain.

  ‘There – did you hear it?’ he says hopefully. My back has clicked despite itself. ‘Now pull your knees to your chest and rock your spine against the floor, like a cradle.’

  I obey him, even though this movement forces my kidneys into impossible contortions. He sees me wince. I lie still on the floor, my legs extended.

  ‘Do you have family you left behind?’ I ask him.

  He sits on the bed, his legs dangling, and says nothing.

  I get to my feet and hobble to my own bed. ‘I haven’t asked you whether there’s a wife or child waiting for you when you get out.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not married. My mother died last year.’

  ’Siblings?’

  ‘I had a brother. Died years ago.’

  ‘Does anybody know you’ve been taken?’

  ‘My shop assistant must have figured out something happened. But if there’s been a coup nobody will be worrying about anybody but themselves.’

  I get a sudden glimpse into what it must be like for the Commander, with people not knowing anything, not knowing what was done in the President’s name.

  ‘He did awful things, you know,’ I can’t resist saying.

  The barber is silent, so I lift my head to look at him. He removes his shoes and socks and slowly lies down on the bed, on his hip, facing me.

  ‘Who did?’ he says.

  ‘The President.’

  ‘How awful?’ he says. ‘What did he do?’ I can’t decipher his tone.

  ‘Had people killed. Dissidents. That sort of thing.’ I dare not go any further.

  ‘You knew this and kept working for him?’ He looks at me quizzically.

  ‘No…’ Now look what I’ve done. I’ll have to tell him more. ‘The Commander told me.’

  ‘And you believe him? How do you know he’s telling the truth?’

  ‘Photographs. He has photographs. Of people who were killed.’

  The barber swings his legs off the bed and goes to the window. The curtains are half-closed, but he sweeps them open vigorously. The valley below is hazy in the midday light, expectant, waiting for evening and the promise of shadows. From the way his back is tensed, I assume our conversation is over, so I roll onto my stomach and try to sleep. Something that the Commander said to me has been percolating in my brain. About the President’s wife. Of course she told her husband, that I understand. They must have laughed about it, lying in their twin beds in the first-floor bedroom, about how she’d seduced the gangly artist, the young portraitist, persuaded him to sleep with her. But why would the President tell the Commander something like that?

  The President’s wife was suffocating to look at – her pores were so blocked from years of foundation use I always wondered how her skin could still breathe. It happened on the third night of my stay at the Summer Residence. She had been sitting for me for two days, with pearls strung around her neck and a gold pendant that kept getting stuck between her sweating breasts each time she shifted. Mock-coy, she would dislodge it slowly as if we were sharing a secret, and I would turn my attention furiously to my palette. The President watched us that afternoon, sitting behind me on a small chair upholstered with velvet. She made eyes at me even more vigorously as a result.

  At dinner, the four of us – my wife was there too – sat with our plates on our laps on the deck overlooking the sea. They were redecorating the house so there was no picnic table for eating outside, and it was too hot to sit indoors. We served ourselves in the dining room and then carried out our plates and perched on the edge of our chairs, sitting in a row facing the sea, which made conversation difficult. Whenever the President said something, I tried to turn my head to face him, but his wife was sitting between us and she obstinately kept her head right in front of his. It was a meal full of discomfort, of making sure I hadn’t left food on my face, of wanting to take a second helping but worrying it would look gluttonous. I remember trying to keep my elbows tucked against my sides while eating a chicken drumstick without cutlery. My wife dropped her fork on the deck and went to fetch another from inside.

  The President said, his mouth full of coleslaw, ‘We’d like you to keep going on the portrait tonight. You seem to be making good progress. My wife would like to keep working.’

  I craned my neck to see his face, but her head was still in the way, her thick nostrils quivering like a giant trying to smell her prey. She chewed on a piece of meat, her mouth primly closed until she swallowed, then parted her lips and said, ‘It would be a pity for us to lose momentum.’ My wife resettled herself on her chair with a clean fork.

  We had already been trying for a child for over a year at that stage. Sex had become a trial for me, only a few years into our marriage. My wife would remove her underwear to shower in the morning and curse when she discovered the first smudge of her period. I would lie on the bed, watching her through the haze of just-departed sleep, and feel personally responsible. We stopped making love at any time other than when she was ovulating, and then it felt clinical, like a doctor doing something to a patient. When she finally did fall pregnant, she took all the credit. I don’t blame her, of course. I did want a child, but more as living proof of my complete union with her, than for the child itself. I was afraid – perhaps I still am – that I would be left out when it arrived, that all her love and attention would be redirected to this child, and I would be left holding the toys and the baby bag full of clean nappies and bottles, alone. She seemed possessive of the child, even before it could be called a child – when it was the size of a grain of rice – and wouldn’t let me put my ear to her belly to hear its heartbeat.

  When we had finished eating that evening, the President’s wife went to her bedroom to prepare, and I kissed my wife and left her with the President out on the deck. A night wind had come up, full of sea salt, and her hair was being whipped around her head like a helicopter blade. She smiled at me strangely, as if she knew something I didn’t. I turned to look back at her from the dining room, through the glass of the sliding door, and saw she’d taken out her pocket mirror and was applying lipstick, flicking her hair out of her face and mouth repeatedly. The President watched her from his deckchair, mesmerized. I was used to seeing men look at her like that, but that time it made a thirst we
ll up in me, a crippling nostalgia for the simple days of our courtship when she hadn’t yet come to equate marriage, and me, with disappointment.

  I walked barefoot through the dimly lit house to the studio, the plush pile giving way beneath my feet. The studio was the only room built into the roof and doubled as a kind of observatory, with a domed glass ceiling and a telescope pointed at Saturn. I hadn’t been into the studio at night before – it was beautifully lit with small lamps that glowed back at themselves in the glass, but horribly impractical for my purposes. I searched unsuccessfully for a light switch at the door for overhead lighting, then hooked my thumb into my palette and began to squeeze out small amounts of paint from the tubes I had already laid out for the next day’s work.

  I heard the door behind me open and shut, and twisted to see the President’s wife turn the key in the lock.

  ’So we won’t be disturbed,’ she said when she saw me looking at her with my eyebrows raised. She was wearing black slacks and an off-the-shoulder jersey with beads sewn along the neckline. ‘I thought we could try something a little different,’ she said. ‘I’ve always admired your drawings; I saw some years ago at an exhibition – they were sketches of your wife I believe? In pencil? Could you do something like that of me?’

  Those were done before she was my wife, when it aroused her to be under my gaze as it wavered between that of lover and of artist. She would strip silently in my bedroom and then walk naked to the tiny, cramped kitchen that doubled as my studio and perch on a stool with her back to me, inviting me to draw.

  ‘Let’s start with something simple,’ the President’s wife said. ‘What if I sit on this chair facing forwards?’

  And then in one movement she pulled her jersey over her head and stood before me, her hair slightly static and her breasts still marked from the wiring of her bra. I’m not sure what it was that made me sleep with her in the end. The thrill of being desired? Payback for the way my wife had applied lipstick in my wake? Perhaps it was just that she stirred pity in me and desire surprised me by stirring with it. The zip on her slacks caught on her underwear and for a few seconds she was bent over, her breasts lunging towards the floor, trying to unhook them. She blushed then, a blush so profound it showed even through her foundation. And I pitied her.

  I flip onto my back, my brainwork heating up the pillow. Of course. The President’s wife is being kept here too. Why else would the President call out her name in the loneliness of his pain? If I was close to power, she was closer.

  11 His chef

  I have just remembered that I left a pocket of potatoes, skinned and halved, on the cutting board in the kitchen. I forgot to transfer them to a tub of water and tonight they will be green from being left in the air too long. I take a chair out to the balcony and put my legs up on the railings. It is only early afternoon, but the light is already starting to magnify the colour in the valley below.

  This woman, the Commander’s wife, is making me feel like a boy trapped in an old man’s body: desire inflames my loins, but with no visible result. She let me hold her hand in the kitchen, briefly, until the steam from the pot singed her arm and the Commander surprised us, but I know he doesn’t mind. He reminds me of myself at his age; I would catch strangers staring at me in a movie queue or at the bank – they always looked like they were trying to drink in my beauty, to ingest it and make it their own. In bed, women would tell me they wanted to possess me. There was one woman – a doctor – who thought beauty was the elixir of life, and she latched onto me and sucked away until I cast her off. But it never bothered me if I caught one of my women with another man, even my wife.

  My daughter’s face and my own are unnervingly similar. Male beauty does not translate well to a female; she has a hardness about her jaw and I always half-expect to find stubble pushing its way through her pores. But she still attracts men, especially the ones who don’t know what they want. My own rule was to treat women like stations on a radio: if you listen to one for too long, who knows what you’re missing on the next bandwidth? The cloying ones fell to pieces, of course. And my wife did too, in the end.

  There is a shifting in the low shrubs beneath the balcony and the Commander’s wife emerges from the overgrown path, her eyes already raised to my level. Was she looking for me? My old heart wants to believe it. She has changed out of her uniform and now wears a summer dress that pulls slightly over her hips, and her hair has been released from its coil. She smiles at me with restraint and calls, ‘What’s for dinner?’ I stand and lean on the balcony, glad that I’d unbuttoned the top three buttons of my shirt before she arrived.

  ‘I’m making pastry at four in the morning, while it’s still cool enough for the butter to stay firm. Care to join me?’

  She reaches down to fix her sandal strap and when she lifts her head again her smile fades beneath my gaze – she is looking at something behind me. I turn and see the barber standing in the doorway, looking down at her with sleep still rising warmly from his head. He comes forward and leans on the rail next to me.

  She pulls at her dress where it clings and looks at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I had no right.’

  He rubs the back of his head and clears his throat. ‘But perhaps you do.’ He glances at me as if I’m eavesdropping.

  I look back at him obstinately, my arms firmly on the rail, but she looks at me imploringly until I sigh loudly and walk back into the room, a word flitting around in my head: cuckolded. Cuckolded. I sit on my bed facing the window and see the barber, really see him, for the first time. He’s dark and vital, with veins that expose the strength of his blood and hair that flows from his head like the fountain of youth itself. But there’s something crumpled about him, about the way he walks and the sound of his voice, as if he’d been crushed when he was small and never recovered. He reminds me of my daughter, that’s what it is – it makes me want to reach out to him and to despise him at the same time.

  It’s silent on the balcony – what kind of game are these two playing? I lean sideways and peer around the open door. He is holding an apple with a note tied around it with masking tape, greedily ripping the tape with his teeth to release the note from its fruity prison. Ingenious. And what would the Commander think about all this? The barber reads it quickly, then nods agreement to her. I listen to her sandals click against her feet as she walks away. Such small things can summon desire.

  My fingers smell of garlic and coriander, years’ worth of the stuff. The barber comes inside.

  ‘Lucky boy,’ I say to him. ‘Midnight tryst planned? Well done.’

  He ignores me. It’s hard to think of myself as an old man. My daughter said that to me the day before I was brought in here. ‘You’re an old man,’ she said. ‘You will die soon. I don’t know if I will miss you.’ People don’t realize what it’s like to age when you’re beautiful, to feel like you reached your peak when you turned forty and every day since that day you’ve become just a small bit uglier. A less attractive man has nothing to lose when he ages. As an older man, I am still handsome, but there is an invisible line that I’ve crossed: my body’s done a dirty deal with gravity and my hair has given up the ghost once and for all. It’s not the wrinkles, it’s things you’re never told to expect – having to piss five times a night, discovering that your calf muscles are disintegrating against your will, leaving you bandy-legged, watching the spider veins cast their purple webs across the backs of your knees, waking up with your eyelids sealed together because your eyes can no longer self-lubricate. And now this: desire that exists without proof. All this shutting down must have a purpose. I think what my daughter was implying is that it’s meant to encourage reckoning and accounting. Moral reckoning.

  OK then, let’s reckon. I don’t believe my wife was ever really mad. I think mental illness is a luxury most people can’t afford. Even after her psychiatrist had persuaded me to put her in an institution, I would sneak into the gardens and look through the window into her room on the ground floor, always ha
lf-expecting to catch her doing something that would prove she was pretending. I never really thought about what that something would be – maybe she would be on the phone to our daughter, laughing and chatting normally? Or she would be doing yoga in her striped legwarmers, on her mat on the floor, with sweat beading gently at her hairline, and her face focused and calm? The disappointment each time I found her sleeping in her bed or staring at the television or sitting on the low armchair rubbing her hands would start deep in my gut and work its way up to the back of my throat where it gagged me.

  Having been failed by my own flesh, and those of my flesh, what else can an old man turn to except power to shore himself up, or at least proximity to power? We all know power and desire couple effortlessly.

  12 His barber

  She had tucked the key beneath the tape around the apple when she threw it up to me on the balcony. A poison-green apple, like the kind we used to grow in the back garden of my mother’s house. She remembers them, of course. It was a small miracle that anything could push its way through that ground, so sandy it couldn’t be called soil. The fruit always tasted salty; perhaps the water table had been contaminated by sea water. There was a mulberry bush in the back too, a thriving plant that unfurled leaves textured like the surface of a brain, and my brother and I fed those to his silkworms until he swapped the worms for marbles with a boy at school. We would dare each other to put a worm on our tongue and see who could bear the soft, blind wriggling the longest – once he swallowed one by accident and examined his stool meticulously the next day to see if it would emerge alive. He cut out small shapes from cardboard – stars, hearts, circles – and put them in the silkworm box that he’d punched repeatedly with a knitting needle so that the worms could breathe; slowly they spun according to his demands, desperate for something to attach their silk to, and then he hung these silken shapes from a mobile above his bed. If he gave them beetroot leaves they spun dark-pink thread instead.