The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  When the train leaves, Sansan finds a brick and puts it next to her mother’s stool. She sits down and watches her mother add eggs and more spices to the pot.

  “Isn’t it a waste of money to put in so much of the expensive spices?” Sansan says.

  “Don’t tell me how to boil eggs. I have done this for forty years, and have brought you up boiling eggs my way.”

  “But even if people can taste the difference, they will never come back to look for your eggs.”

  “Why not give them their one chance to eat the best eggs in the world, then?” her mother says, raising her voice. A few vendors look at them, winking at one another. The marketplace is full of eyes and ears. By dinnertime, the whole town will have known that Sansan has shown up and attacked her poor mother, and children of the town will be warned, at the dinner tables, not to follow Sansan’s example, a daughter not fulfilling her filial duty, who spends money on renting when her mother has kept a room ready for her.

  “Mama, why don’t you think of retirement?” Sansan says in a lower voice.

  “Who will feed me then, a poor old widow?”

  “I will.”

  “You don’t even know how to take care of yourself,” her mother says. “What you need is a man like Tu.”

  Sansan looks at her own shadow on the ground, and the fragments of eggshells by her leather sandals. The eggshells were her only toys before she befriended Tu from the next stall, the fruit vendor’s son. Tu’s parents have retired, living in a two-bedroom flat that Tu bought for them. The next stall now sells cigarettes and lighters and palm-sized pictures of blond women whose clothes, when put close to the flame, disappear. After a moment, Sansan asks, “What happened to Tu?”

  “His parents came by yesterday, and asked if you wanted to go back to him.”

  “Why?”

  “A man needs a woman. You need a husband, too.”

  “Is that what I am, a substitute?”

  “Don’t act willful. You’re not a young girl anymore.”

  “Why did he get a divorce?”

  “People change their minds. Sansan, if you ask me, I would say just go back to Tu without questioning.”

  “Is that what Tu wants? Or is it his parents’ idea?”

  “What’s the difference? He’ll marry you if you want to go back to him, that’s what his parents said.”

  “That would make it an arranged marriage.”

  “Nonsense. We’ve seen you two grow up together from the beginning,” Sansan’s mother says. “Even in arranged marriages, people fall in love.”

  Sansan feels a sting in her heart. “Sure, people fall in love in arranged marriages, but that’s not the love I want.”

  “What do you want, then, Miss Romantic?”

  Sansan does not reply. A romance is more than a love story with a man. A promise is a promise, a vow remains a vow; such is the grandeur of Casablanca, such is the true romance that keeps every day of her life meaningful.

  Neither of them speaks. Sansan watches her mother pick up the fresh eggs with the ladle, and crack the shells carefully with a spoon so that the spices will soak the eggs well. When her mother finishes, she scoops up an egg and puts it into Sansan’s hands without a word. The egg is hot but Sansan does not drop it. She looks at the cracks on the shell, darkened by the spices and soy sauce like a prophet’s fractured turtle shell. When she was younger, she had to beg her mother for a long time before she was given an egg to eat, but when Tu was around, her mother always gave them each an egg without hesitation. Sansan wonders if her mother still remembers such things, the nourishing of their relationship long before she and Tu became lovers.

  A few minutes pass, and then, across the street, two jeeps stop with screeching noises. Sansan looks up and sees several cops jump out and surround Gong’s Dried Goods Shop. Soon the customers are driven out the door. “What’s going on?” the vendors ask one another. Sansan’s mother stands up and looks across the street for a minute, and hands the ladle to Sansan.

  “Take care of the stove for me,” her mother says, and walks across the street with a few other curious vendors.

  Sansan watches her mother pushing to the front of the store, where the cops have set up red warning tapes. She wonders why, after forty years in the marketplace, her mother is still interested in other people’s business.

  Ten minutes later, her mother returns and says to the vendors, “You’ll never imagine this – they’ve found opium in Gong’s goods.”

  “What?”

  “No wonder their business is always so good – they add opium when they make their nuts and seeds so people will always want to go back to them,” Sansan’s mother says. “What black-hearted people they are!”

  “How did the police find out?” the vendor across the aisle asks.

  “Someone working in the shop must have told on them.”

  More vendors come back. Sansan listens to them talking about Gong’s opium business, her palms wet and sticky. She was planning to go to Gong’s to buy more sunflower seeds before the end of the day; even the thought of the sunflower seeds makes her eager to go home and hide herself in a pile of cracked shells, letting the taste on her tongue take her over and carry her away to a safe place, where she watches over Tu and Min serenely. Is that what she is living on, a poisoned food, a drugged dream?

  Sansan’s mother turns to her. “But let’s not talk about other people’s trouble. What do you think of the proposal, Sansan?”

  “To marry Tu? No, I don’t want to marry him.”

  “You’ve been waiting for him all these years. Don’t be silly.”

  “I’ve never waited for him.”

  “But that’s a lie. Everyone knows you’re waiting for him.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Why else do you never get married? Everyone knows he did this horrible thing to you, but men make mistakes. Even his parents apologized yesterday. It’s time to think about forgiveness.”

  “What’s to forgive?”

  “He had you, and then left you for another woman. Listen, it would not be that bad a thing if you went back to him. As the old saying goes – what belongs to someone will belong to him eventually.”

  “Wait a minute, Mama. What do you mean he had me?”

  Sansan’s mother blushes. “Yon know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know. If you mean sex, no, he’s never had me.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It was understandable, and it was nobody’s fault.”

  Sansan, for the first time, understands the town’s tolerance of her, a pitiful woman used and then abandoned by a lover, a woman unmarriable because she will never be able to demonstrate her virginity on the snow-white sheet spread on the wedding bed. “Mama, I have nothing to do with Tu. We never had sex.”

  “Are you sure?” Sansan’s mother asks, hopeful disbelief in her eyes.

  “I’m a spinster losing my mind. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you ask the town to vote on my virginity?”

  Sansan’s mother stares at her for a long moment, and claps her hands. “That’s even better. I didn’t know you loved him so much. I’ll go talk to his parents tonight, and tell them you’ve kept your cleanness for him all these years.”

  “I did nothing for him.”

  “But why wouldn’t you get married, if he never had you?”

  Sansan does not reply. She wonders how much of the gossip about her lost virginity burdened her father before his death. She wonders why her mother has never confronted her all these years; but then, how could her mother, a proud yet humble woman of tradition, ask her daughter such a thing when they have never talked about sex in her family?

  “If you can’t answer the question, it’s time to make up your mind,” Sansan’s mother says.

  “My mind has been made up all along. I won’t marry Tu.”

  “Are you going crazy?”

  “Mama, why do you want to be the best egg seller in the world?”

  Sansan
’s mother shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Mama, why do you put more spices in?”

  “If I’m telling people I sell the best eggs in the world, I have to keep my promise.”

  “But nobody cares about it. You’re keeping a promise that matters only to you.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m an illiterate. Besides, what has that to do with your marriage?”

  “I have my own promise to keep.”

  “Why are you so stubborn? Do you know we’ll both end up as crazy women if you don’t get married?” Sansan’s mother says, and starts to cry.

  Another train pulls into the station with a long whistle. Sansan listens to her mother chanting in a trembling voice, and wipes a drop of tear off. Indeed she is going crazy, hurting her mother so, the only person who loves her despite who she is. But she has no other choice. People in this world can discard their promises like used napkins, but she does not want to be one of them.

  A man enters the marketplace, in a dirty shirt and jeans and carrying a shapeless bag. He hugs the bag close to his body as if it were a woman. Sansan watches the man sit down at the open space between the two stalls across the aisle from her mother’s stove. He takes a flattened cardboard box and a knife out of the bag, the kind with a long and sharp blade that fruit vendors use to cut watermelons. Then he takes off his shirt, points the knife to his left arm, and with a push, carefully slices open his flesh, from the elbow to the shoulder. He seems so calm and measured in his movements that Sansan and a few other people who have noticed him all watch with quiet amazement. The man dips his index finger in the blood, checks his finger as if he is a calligrapher, and writes down the words on the cardboard box: Give me ten yuan and I will let you slice me once wherever you like; if you finish my life with one cut, you owe me nothing.

  The man has to shout out the words twice before more people gather.

  “What a crazy man,” an old woman says.

  “An inventive way to beg, though,” another woman says.

  “Why not just begging?”

  “Who’d give him money? He’s a strong man. He should be able to find some work.”

  “Young people don’t like to work now. They like easy money,” an old man says.

  “What’s easy about hurting oneself?”

  “Hey, what’s your story?” a young man asks. “Don’t you know you have to make up some really good tragedies to beg?”

  People laugh. The man sits quietly in the middle of the circle, the blood dripping from his elbow onto his jeans, but he seems not to notice it. After a while, he shouts the words again.

  Sansan’s mother sighs. She fumbles in her cash box and then walks to the man. “Here is ten yuan. Take it, young man, and go find a job. Don’t waste your life with this nonsense.”

  “But there’s no job to find.”

  “Take the money then.”

  The man holds the blade between his two palms, and offers the knife handle to Sansan’s mother, “Here you go, Auntie.”

  “Why? I don’t want to cut you.”

  “But you have to, I can’t take your money without you cutting me. It’s written here,” the man says.

  “Just take it.”

  “I’m not a beggar.”

  “What are you, then?” someone in the crowd asks.

  “An idiot,” someone else says, and people break out laughing. The man does not move, still holding out the knife for Sansan’s mother. She shakes her head and lets the bill drop onto the cardboard. The man returns the bill to the foot of Sansan’s mother, and sits back at his spot.

  Sansan picks up the bill and walks to the man. The man looks up at her, and she looks into his eyes. Without a word, he puts the knife in her hand. She studies his body, the naked skin smooth and tanned, and the wound that’s quietly bleeding. She touches his upper arm with one finger, testing and calculating, and then moves her fingertip to his shoulder. The man shivers slightly as her finger traces his flesh.

  “Sansan, are you crazy?” her mother says.

  The man’s muscles loosen under her caressing finger; after all these years, she finally meets someone who understands what a promise is. Crazy as they may seem to the world, they are not alone, and they will always find each other. Such is the promise of life; such is the grandeur. “Don’t worry, Mama,” Sansan says, and turns to smile at her mother before she points the knife at the man’s shoulder and slices, slowly opening his flesh with love and tenderness.

  Mother Tongue

  Nadine Gordimer

  Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) is a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She won the Man Booker Prize for her 1974 novel The Conservationist, and has since won numerous awards and recognition worldwide. A fierce defender of equality, Gordimer refused to accept her shortlisting for the 1998 Orange Prize because the award recognises only women writers.

  But everything’s by chance – how else would she ever have met him? Been here.

  They fell in love in her country. Met there.

  A taxi he had taken skidded into her small car. It was raining the way Europe weeps in winter, and the taxi driver slammed out of his vehicle and accosted her from the other side of her window, streaming water as if dissolving in anger. His passenger intervened, exonerating her and citing the weather as responsible. The damage to taxi and car was minimal; names, addresses and telephone numbers were exchanged for the purpose of insurance claims. – A hoo-hah about nothing. – He said that to her as if this was something he and she, in their class as taxi patron and private car owner, would rate it before the level of indignation of the Pakistani or whatever the taxi man was. The passenger spoke in English, native to him, but saw through the blur of rain the uncertain nod of one who has heard but not quite understood. He didn’t know a colloquial turn of phrase to translate the passing derision into that country’s language.

  How he came to call her had to do with a document he was to sign, as witness; couldn’t have been an opportunity to follow up any attraction to a pretty face, because the rain had made hers appear smeary as the image in a tarnished mirror. So they met again, over a piece of paper in a café near the lawyer’s office where she worked. It was of course still raining, and he was able to make conversation with his cobbled-together vocabulary in the country’s language, remarking that you didn’t have days on end like this where he came from; that’s how she learnt: from Africa. South Africa. Mandela. The synapses and neurons made the identifying connection in the map of every European mind. Yes, he had picked up something of her language, although the course he’d taken in preparation hadn’t proved of much use when he arrived and found himself where everybody spoke it all the time and not in phrase-book style and accent. They laughed together at the way he spoke it, a mutual recognition closer, with the flesh-and-bone structure, shining fresh skin, deep-set but frank eyes, before him in place of the image in the tarnished mirror. Blond hair – real blond, he could tell from experience of his predilection for Nordic types, genuine or chemically concocted (once naked, anyway, they carelessly showed their natural category). She knew little of his language, the few words she remembered, learnt at school. But the other forms of recognition were making communication between them. They began to see each other every day; she would take his calls on her mobile, carried into the corridor or the women’s room out of earshot of others in the lawyer’s office. There among the wash-basins and toilet booths the rendezvous was decided.

  He worked for one of the vast-tentacled international advertising agencies, and had got himself sent to her country by yet another kind of recognition; the director’s, of his intelligence, adaptability, and sanguine acceptance of the need to learn the language of the country to which he would be sent as one of the co-ordinator’s of the agency’s conglomerate hype (global, they called it). He was not a copywriter or designer, he was a businessman who, as he told her, had many friends and contacts of his generation
in different enterprises and might – as they were all on the lookout for – move on to some other participation in the opportunities of their world. By this he also meant his and hers, both of them young. He saw that world of theirs, though they were personally far apart geographically, turning round technology as the earth revolves round the sun.

  She shared an apartment with a girl-friend; the first love-making was in his apartment where he lived, alone, since coming to Germany some months past. He had had his share of affairs at home – that surely must be, in view of his composed, confidently attractive face, the lean sexual exuberance of his body, and his quick mind; by lapse of e-mails and calls between them, the affair with someone back there was outworn. The girl met by chance probably had had a few experiments. She spoke of a boy-friend who had emigrated somewhere. Of course she might just be discreet and once they were in their sumptuous throes of love-making, what went before didn’t matter. Her flesh was not abundant but alertly responsive – a surprising find. He’d thought of German female types as either rather hefty, athletic, or fat.

  But it was her tenderness to him, the lovingness in the sexuality that made this foreign affair somewhat different from the others, so that – he supposed it’s what’s called falling in love – they married. In love. Passed that test. An odd move in his life, far from what would have been expected, among his circle at home. But powerful European countries are accustomed to all sorts of invasions, both belligerent and peaceful, and this foreign one was legal, representing big business, an individual proof of the world’s acceptance of Germany’s contrition over the past. He was suitably well received when she took him to her family, and as a welcome novelty among her friends. With their easy company he became more fluent in the to-and-fro of their language. And of course it was the language of the love affair and the marriage that had been celebrated in true German style, a traditional festivity which her circle of friends, who had moved on to an unceremonious life-style, nevertheless delightedly animated around the veiled bride and three-piece-suited groom. His was a personality and a growing adeptness in exchanges that, in their remaining months there, made Germany a sort of his-and-hers.