The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  —

  So I was not a virgin when I married Hritesh, though I led him to believe differently. On our wedding night we fell asleep in the petaled bed as soon as we removed our elaborate clothes, consummating our marriage four days later, shyly, and with genuine ineptitude during the afternoon. Whatever I had worried about disappeared when I saw his bashfulness and inexperience. It made me gentle toward him, holding him in that act of love no differently than a mother holding her boy; it is pity, I thought, the way a mother holds her boy. In the morning I woke before him and watched him sleep, this half-stranger who had grown up in my neighborhood and whom I had passed by walking to or from school. Love had not come yet, though they told me it would, growing slowly over the years of our lives together. What I felt was a kind of detached fondness, which often I drew out of me to hold up and inspect like an X-ray, looking for signs of growth or change. Once, when he placed a sweet in my mouth, I thought I observed a change, a new tender shoot. He took my braid in his hand and wrapped it around his fist, marveling at its strength. And wept during our first true fight, tears that startled, even frightened me, as his eyes got so red. I touched his hair, saying, “A husband shouldn’t cry.” And then after a while he stopped.

  “Will you play something for me?”

  But I would not touch my veena. Sometimes when my husband was at work I walked by the home of my veena teacher. He lived in a small bungalow behind a wall that was topped with shards of glass: Through the gate I could see a garden, and I could hear children’s voices coming from the other side of the gate. Once, I saw a woman going through, a young woman with flowers in her hair. After that I stopped walking there. Each day that summer, the heat that collected in the small rooms of our flat was intolerable, and we brought our mattresses up to the roof and slept without blankets. Then my husband received a scholarship and we went to Germany. The air in Mainz was thin and dry, not like the heat of home. It was lighter and deadlier, this fall air. My husband was studying particle physics at the university, and I spent my days in the apartment they rented to students, which, though it was not much larger than our flat at home, seemed set up for a kind of life I didn’t know how to live yet. I had thought that I would feel like a new person when I came to Germany. It was not that I was lonely. I was no lonelier than I had ever been. But I had some difficulty sleeping. I missed those nights on the roof, lying on a thin cotton mattress. I missed the looseness of those nights, watching the stuck kites in the trees shifting as a breeze came through, the fat orange moon.

  We went one evening to the house of my husband’s adviser, who was Gujarati, and his German wife. This professor had been living in Germany for so long that he now ate meat, and there was no food for us at the dinner because even the salad had bacon. I didn’t know whether it was less polite to keep some food on my plate and not eat it, or to not put any food on my plate at all. I was afraid to look at Hritesh because I was sure that whatever he was doing was the wrong thing, and he would be doing it with a smile at the center of his burning face. I was hungry and watched the professor and his wife eat. The professor’s dark face had taken on a German look, a frowning, inward expression.

  “You don’t like German food?” said the wife, finally, as I sat in front of my empty plate.

  “We are vegetarians,” I said.

  “It’s only chicken.” Her arms were white and bare and looked soft, but she was plain and wore a shapeless blouse. “Here.”

  I covered my plate with my hands. The professor looked at me with a smile on his face—what could have been called a smile. Sometime later he said a phrase to me in German, but I didn’t know he was speaking to me, and kept my eyes fixed politely away. He said it again. This time my husband said, “He’s asking you how your German is coming.”

  I said the one phrase I knew in German, “Ich spreche kein Deutsch.”

  The professor replied in English. “Smart man, your husband. He’s picking it up.”

  “You like this city, Mainz?” said the wife.

  “I haven’t seen much of it,” I said.

  “Sie hat immer Angst,” he said to Hritesh. “Do you tell her about your research?”

  “I don’t want to bore her.”

  “You don’t bore me.” And I noticed, now, that he had grown thin, my husband. His face especially. It had a restless quality to it, and his eyes were unusually bright. After dinner, we walked home in the cold, what felt like bitter cold to me, though it was not yet winter. At this time of night, the city was lit yellow, spilling over with students, laughing and arguing in their harsh, orderly language. “Why didn’t you tell them that we were vegetarians?”

  “I thought he knew.”

  “Is he a good man, this professor of yours?”

  “I think so. He’s brilliant.”

  “What did he say about me in German?”

  “He said you were scared.”

  “Scared? Scared of what?”

  But he didn’t know. “We’ll have to have them over for dinner,” he said, with a kind of despair.

  —

  My husband glanced often out the window when we were at home. He had acquired habits I found odd. First thing when he arrived, he ran his finger under the rims of the three lampshades in our apartment, and sometimes he took the framed picture of his father off the wall and removed the back. Then he would replace it and clean the glass, almost apologetically, freshly anointing his father’s forehead with kumkum and sandalwood paste, as we did to honor our dead.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “No—nothing. It comforts me.”

  He did seem comforted by his actions: They eased him. After dinner we would watch the one channel on TV that sometimes showed English movies. When I was alone, I began to go on long walks. I wanted to get my skin used to, or even immune to the cold. I wanted my body to accept Germany, its new home. It was true, I had spent so much time in the flat because I was scared to leave it. I was constantly worried I was going to be made a fool. And as the days grew colder and shorter, the flat seemed to grow smaller and closer, contracting around me like a fist. I walked around the university, which was hundreds of years old, and decorated with the statues of serious-nosed men. But for all my worry, hardly anyone seemed to notice me. I bought coffee at the cafeteria and drank it slowly as I sat. This is the future, I thought, I had wondered so much about. It was here now. I could stop wondering what would happen to me.

  “Arundathi?” When I looked up, it was my husband’s professor, carrying his food on a tray. An odd hour to eat, not a mealtime at all, nearing four.

  “Where is Hritesh?”

  He shrugged. “You imagine he is always with me. Were you meeting him?”

  “No.” Then I said, “You eat here?”

  “Yes, on occasion. It’s not bad.”

  “Your wife doesn’t make—?”

  “No, she’s not a good wife like you, packing lunches. I’m going to eat this in my office if you’d like to join me.”

  His office was in a squat, modern building that looked out on the river. It was warm in the room, and he sweated as he ate, wiping at his forehead with a napkin. Again I watched him eat. He had thick, sensual lips and intelligent eyes, near black, and cutting. But there had once been a softness I could make out in his face, in his eyes. I thought I could see the kind of boy he had been, brash and loved, and happy. When he was finished, he belched into his closed fist.

  “Your husband is transferring out of my department.”

  “What?”

  “He’s going to mathematics. Or trying, at any rate.”

  “He didn’t say anything about it.”

  “Your husband,” he said, shaking his head. “Your husband is coming up with some strange ideas.”

  He placed his tray on the stack of trays he had accumulated in his office. The books on the shelves were not just science—I spotted three slim volumes of Urdu poetry.

  “You speak Urdu?”

  “Not anymore. I used to.�
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  “I studied it in school.”

  “I’ve never read more beautiful poetry. I can’t read those books anymore but I remember what they were like. I’ve lost the language.” There was something about the way he was looking at me. I had never felt physical desire before, and was not sure I felt it now. It was my heart coming up in my mouth. Beating loud in my ears, my heart.

  “Are you happy here, in Germany?”

  “Yes,” I said, automatically. “Are you?”

  He went to lock the door. Then he came to where I was sitting and leaned down to put his mouth on mine. I could taste the meat in his mouth from his sandwich. I stood up and pressed my body against him. I was on my period, but he said he did not mind. There was nothing in it, no shyness. There was no anger. It was deliberate and almost tender. At one point, realizing we would be visible to the students below, he went to turn off the light. Outside, the river was a flat sheet of silver, shining so hard it hurt to look at it, even as the sky was dimming, the thick gray clouds seeming to absorb all that brilliance. Without giving anything back.

  —

  At home, I washed myself and made supper and waited past dark for my husband, who now kept irregular hours at the lab. I was not altered, my hair was still neat, my clothes and my face. It stunned me, my own neatness, my lack of change. I thought, this is not the woman I have become, this is the woman I have always been. When Hritesh finally arrived, I looked hard at him, wanting to feel pain. What a tired face my husband had for someone so young. His skin was a rich nut-brown but darker and delicate under his eyes. “You didn’t tell me you were transferring departments.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

  “I saw Professorji at the cafeteria.”

  “Oh god,” he said, “we still have to invite them, you remember? To dinner.”

  “Look at you. You’re working too hard.”

  “I’m close,” he said. “I’m close to something.”

  “Close to what?”

  But he wouldn’t—or couldn’t say. Later I found him standing worried at the window, looking out at the street.

  “You see that van?”

  I looked. There, parked across the street, was the white delivery van of the bakery around the corner.

  “What is it?”

  He stood there for a long while. Then he came away from the window. “Nothing.”

  The van was gone in the morning. As he was leaving for work he said, “Tell me if the van comes back.”

  “You want me to call you at the lab if the van comes back?”

  “No, no, don’t call. Just write down the time.” Then, at the look on my face, he said, “Forget it. Forget it, na? Don’t do anything.”

  But there was, quite suddenly, a miracle that was happening outside: It was snowing. I had seen snow in movies, but it was fake snow, only soapsuds, and looked different than this. Real snow was so small, and came all at once, but gently, and fell in a way I had never seen anything fall before, with none of the weight and force of rain, with profound and unhurried silence. We stood like children at the window. The snow touched everything we could see, like light. We were afraid only because we didn’t know how it would feel in our fingers and our hair and on our faces. But after a while Hritesh became brave and handed me my coat. Outside, there was a quality of silence I had never heard before, even in this quiet country. I caught a wafer of snow on my finger. I licked it. It was a pure drop of water, tasting of nothing, holy water. Hritesh, I saw, was standing quite still, like I was, as the white gathered shaggy in his hair and eyebrows and eyelashes and on the shoulders of his coat. There was something absurd about the way he stood there, almost unblinking, but I was so glad. He had sensed, as I had, the sacredness of the living moment, the sacred quality of that silence, and become, like me, utterly still.

  Yet we bore no resentment toward the children who broke into the quiet with their shrieks and their snowballs and their stamping feet. We went inside, shook the snow from our hair, and wiped our dripping faces. He was smiling, my husband, he had a good smile, the smile of a shy young girl. “You’ll be late,” I said.

  “Arundathi—”

  “You’ll be late,” I said, pushing him lightly toward the door. When he was gone, I sat down on the sofa. I thought I would cry. But I didn’t cry. I just sat there.

  —

  For two weeks, I watched myself. I cooked the meals, as I always had, making the sad substitutions with German vegetables and spices that made my own cooking unfamiliar to me. The snow melted and the world became ordinary again, even drab, with all that mud. I walked around the university, but I didn’t see the professor, except for once, talking to a student outside the physics building, and I quickly turned around and walked the other way before he saw me. My husband during this time pulled further and further into himself. I saw him once, too, on campus, through the lighted window of a classroom where he sat in the last row, furiously writing notes. At home, he seemed almost apologetic, and talked to me gently, as if compensating for some hurt he had caused me. The matter of the van was not mentioned. Some days it sat parked for hours when he was at the university, but left before he got home.

  Then one evening the van had not gone when my husband got home, and he became very agitated. He was frightened, I could see, and I began to feel frightened, too. He kept walking to the window and looking out at the van. He wouldn’t tell me what was the matter. He was suppressing tears: They trembled on the lids of his eyes and wet his eyelashes. I sat with him, talking to him very quietly, in our mother tongue, which seemed to calm him just a bit, to make his suffering just bearable. When I ran out of things to say he begged me to keep speaking, so I recited the poems I had learned in school, and then, when I came to the end of those, nursery rhymes. I talked and talked for what felt like hours, until my throat and tongue were tired, even my jaw. Sometimes I would fall into a light doze, and wake to see him in such a terrifying state of despair I would rouse myself completely and begin talking again. Then it was dawn. He was tired out. He stretched his body on the bed and slept. I washed my face in the sink with cold water, put on a clean sari, and went to the office of his adviser. It was too early, and the building was locked; I waited outside for some time. It was cold, and it was good to feel cold. In my tiredness I leaned against it, pressed it close to me to keep me awake. I felt love for my husband all at once, bright as sunlight, breathtaking. I thought of him on our wedding day, his smiling face surrounded by red and white flowers. After a while a janitor came and unlocked the door and I went to the third floor and sat opposite the professor’s office, and, in the warmth of the hallway, dozed until he came and prodded me awake. We went into his office. He was angry to see me and said that it “looked bad” for me to come there. As he lectured me I began to wonder at the little tenderness I had felt for him. He now looked so self-satisfied, his face the wide, fleshy face of a frog. With his frog’s tongue he wet his lips. He made no allusion to the last time we had seen each other, as though our physical awareness of the other had shifted back to its original, blank state. But I remembered him, his wide shoulders, his soft belly. Then he said, “Well?”

  “What is my husband researching? Is it dangerous?”

  “Dangerous? In what way?”

  “Something has happened. I don’t know quite what, he won’t tell me. Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, no. There is nothing dangerous about his research. Dangerous maybe for his career, nothing else. He believes that he’s found a fundamental error in the basic precepts of mathematics that disproves everything that came after it. He believes he is on the cusp of developing a new system of numbers that will change the way we understand the world.”

  “What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “The error?”

  “Two and two is not four.”

  “Two and two is not four? What is it, then?”

  “For that, you’ll have to ask him.”

 
“Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “To be honest, I didn’t quite know the extent of it until a few days ago. The maths chair and I had a long chat.”

  “Two and two is not four. Could it be true?”

  He answered me with a look.

  “Will you help him? My husband?”

  “How can I help him?”

  “I don’t know—there must be some way—”

  “I’m a professor, not an ayah. I can’t force him to study this and not study that, to do this but not to do that.”

  I was pleading. “He needs help.”

  “Go home to your husband. He needs a good wife to pack him lunches. That’s how you help him. You be good and gentle and kind to him and make him feel like a man.” He fixed me in his gaze. A brilliant man, but not a good man, I knew that now, too late.

  Then I was back outside, in the widening morning. The sunlight was sharp and dripped into my eyes. They were having a parade, the city of Mainz, another parade, for there had been two or three already this month. The parades, my husband told me, would stop only in March, after Lenten time. The thought of him waking embarrassed or frightened clenched around me. I didn’t want him to wake alone. But though it was not very far to the flat, the streets were dense, nearly impenetrable with people. There was a marching band, loud brass, and the music was meant to be cheerful but it hit my chest with a booming menace. I remembered the firecrackers that went off in the streets at home during parades, a wild scattering of noise that was so unlike the orderly racket of the marching band—it had never occurred to me that it would be a noise I’d miss. In the heart of this noise I thought: My life is starting. For a moment I felt a frenzy that was like happiness. Then the marching band moved farther down the street and the clamor lessened. In its place was a hideous group of Punch-and-Judy puppets, larger, even, than human-size, with enormous red noses and fat cheeks. But there were no strings—people, I realized, in painted masks. The masks were large and heavy looking, three or four times the size of the true heads underneath, but the bodies bore them lightly as they ambled down the street, clowning for the children who sat on the shoulders of their parents and clapped their hands and laughed with delight, pointing their chubby fingers. I let my terrified heart calm, thinking, people not puppets. The expressions on the masks were contorted with delight, delight that came like an agony upon them, and I could not calm. I could not calm and I could not hide my face. I could not pass until the procession was finished. I could not stand still. But what choice did I have? I stood and watched as the puppets made their way down the street. I stood there until the procession was finished and the street was cleared, and then I walked home to my husband.