by Ahdaf Soueif
This was the kind of conversation you had with Ingie. She also knew everything about everything that happened, or— as was more often the case—that almost happened around the place: the children snatched, the near rapes, the Filipinos almost executed but deported instead, the German who went crazy. For all her tartiness, though, she was a good mom. They were both good parents, and you always found them in Kiddiworld on the last Thursday of the month—Western Family Day—and there would be this massive gray-haired Turk whizzing down the lighthouse slide with little Melody held tight on what Wayne called his “lamp” while Ingie waved at them, clutching Murat to her breast and laughing.
Now, of course, you don’t see them there anymore. You don’t see them anywhere, really. Even though they’re still around. Well, nobody wants to see much of them to tell the truth. I mean, Elaine always said he was a bit weird, but I never knew how weird until I heard all that stuff about the camera. But of course I didn’t know that until later. When it happened I hadn’t seen Ingie for a while. I’d actually stopped going around that much. I still took Wayne there. But I’d leave him, then go and collect him. That night, though, I went. I had to. And the air in the compound was, as I said, not just full of the scent of jasmine, but literally heavy with it. It was eight o’clock and the older children were still out. Climbing the railings by the pool, running between the bushes, whispering, then a burst of laughter. I had to go. I knew that a lot of people had gone the night before and I’d watched people coming and going all morning and all afternoon. Well, that’s maybe the Muslim way. But we usually just send a card. Or we go to the funeral. But I decided I’d better go or it would maybe look unfriendly. So I waited till I’d put Wayne to bed and I told Rich and I went out and it just hit me: how pleasant the night air was and how fragrant. I walked slowly because I had no idea what I should do or say once I got there. I looked up at their windows and they were all lit up and all the curtains wide open. I walked up the stairs and from outside the door I could hear the Qur’an being chanted, so I knocked and someone let me in and to the left were maybe twenty men sitting in a circle around a cassette player, silent. Screened from them, around the corner, huddled on the floor, a veiled woman, all in black, listened too. I stood unsure of what to do. Then the woman got to her feet and it was Ingie. She opened the door to the inner bit of the apartment, let me in, and closed the door behind us. She sat down on the sofa and I sat on a chair close to her. The apartment was full of women. Women and babies. Women sitting. Women making coffee. Women preparing food and handing it to the men outside. One woman was doing the dishes. Another was folding some laundry. All the women were in black. But the babies were bright spots of color. Murat—in red dungarees and a red and white shirt—hung on to his mother’s knees for a moment and then propelled himself toward his sister’s shiny blue tricycle. He fell, cried, was picked up and dandled by one of the women. I finally looked full at Ingie. I was all ready to find that she had aged overnight. But she hadn’t. She seemed, if anything, younger. She had lost a lot of weight. I don’t know how she managed it in only twenty-three hours, but she had, and she looked slight and frail in her long black skirt and her black T-shirt. No makeup, her hair pulled back and knotted with a rubber band, black circles around her eyes. Her skin—not just the skin of her face but of her arms, hands, and feet; all you could see of her—had grown finer, almost transparent. And she had lost her poise. Her movements were slow and awkward, adolescent. When she sat, her feet turned inward toward each other, like a shy girl or a twisted doll. Her eyes were red, and seeing me look, she pointed at them and whispered, “I have no tears.” She also had no voice. Even her whisper had to be forced out. Every once in a while she would convulse in what looked like the prelude to a fit of weeping, but then nothing would come of it and she would just sit quiet again with a hand on either knee and her feet turned inward.
Staring at her fingers, she whispered, “People live fifty years. Seventy years, even. She lived fifty months.” The woman sitting next to her on the sofa—a fat Egyptian who was perspiring so much you couldn’t tell the sweat from the tears— pointed at the ceiling, then spread her hands, palms upward. Ingie whispered, “He gave her to me. Why He take her away? Why?” The woman reached over and patted the hand resting on the knee closer to her and said, “You are a Muslim.” Ingie’s voice rattled as she struggled to break out of her whisper. “I am Muslim. But she was my daughter.” Then she went into one of her brief, dry-eyed convulsions. The woman patted her hand again and turned and spoke in Arabic to her own daughter hulking in black lace behind her. Ingie reached under a cushion and took out a pack of blue Silk Cut. Three Turkish women sprang up to get her an ashtray. After two drags and a whole lot of coughing she stubbed it out. Her white arms—no bracelet, no rings other than her gold wedding band—moved in dramatic gestures. “I cannot believe. From yesterday I am thinking, she will come from here, she will run from there. I see her run. I still hear her cry ‘Mama!’ A minute. All it is. One minute. I do it. I do it.” She hit her breast. The Turkish woman Elaine says is her best friend stepped in from the kitchen and stood for a minute watching her. The Egyptian woman grabbed her hand and said, “But what happen? How it happen yesterday?”
“Yesterday,” Ingie whispers like a machine, a robot with batteries running low, “yesterday we are at home all day. The children are restless. I take them to the shopping mall. My husband so tired, he not want to go. I say okay, we walk. We take my friend downstairs and her baby. We go. We make the tour. We give the children ice cream. We come back. Outside, I remember, no more Cérélac for Murat. I say to my friend: ‘You keep the children. I run across the road for Cérélac.’ ” She looks around. “I don’t want to take Melody in the shop. She always want chocolates and sweets and I think is bad for her. My friend say, ‘Okay.’ I cross. Then I hear Melody: ‘Mama!’ I turn and she is run after me and the car is coming so fast …” There is silence. She shakes her head. “I watching. He hit her, then the car carry her long down the road. Then she fall and start to go over and over. Everyone … they are running and the man from Jasmine flower shop, he carry her and we run to hospital, but she is die.” Her hands fall on her knees and she looks around. Looks at me. Her eyes have a questioning, doubting look in them as though one of us might tell her she is wrong and Melody is not “die.” The woman next to her murmurs in Arabic and two of the Turkish women—one with braids, round spectacles, and a fat baby and the other very classy, with perfectly painted nails and one of those serpent rings that cover a whole finger—have started to cry into some pink Kleenex. Ingie is rocking gently to and fro on the sofa while Murat leans against her legs and chews on a cucumber wedge. Melody’s toys fill the room and a fat Encyclopedia of Home Medicine lies on the desk in the corner.
A little later, when I leave, I linger in the garden. I don’t really want to go home just yet, and Rich is looking after Wayne for once, so I go to Elaine’s. I can’t stay with her very long because it’s evening and Mike, her husband, is there, but I tell her about the scene at Ingie’s and she says, “He never goes out weekends. He works all week and sleeps all weekend. Kids get restless.” But as I say, I did see him in Kiddiworld.
When I left Elaine I decided to go across the road and buy some flowers, a surprise for Rich. I don’t often do that kind of thing, but just to say thanks for looking after Wayne.
I cross the road. There are no marks on the surface, no bent lampposts, no police tape. Nothing to say that something out of the ordinary happened here last night.
The flower man, a greasy Lebanese I’ve never liked, said, “You have seen what happened last night?”
“The child?”
“Ah!” he said. “I saw it all. Nobody has a good view like me.”
I chose five red roses and he started to strip them of leaves and thorns.
“I am standing at the door here. I see the lady cross. I know her. Often I see her. Always with the children. This time I see her cross the road and the other lady wait
with the children. Then I see the little girl: she calls and runs. The mother turns and the car just boom.” He slams a fist into the open palm of his other hand. “Just boom and then carries her off: twenty-four meters. The mother is on the island in the middle of the road. Her arms are stretched out. But the screaming is from the brakes and the tires.” He lays the roses carefully on a sheet of cellophane and bends to pick out some ferns to put with them.
“Me, I have started to run. The car drops her and she rolls over and over and she rolls into my arms like that. Blood is everywhere. I lift her. The head falls back and the eyes are all the way up so you can only see the white. But she is breathing. I hold her head against my chest and I run and run very fast to the hospital. The head, it is spurting blood at me—in pulses. Today, you know, I have asked my friend the doctor— he plays chess with me—I have asked him how much blood is a child, just four, having in her body? He says maybe four liters. Well, I tell you: it was four liters on me and I don’t know how much on the road. I did not even notice, though, truly. I carried her to the hospital but she was dead. It was only later, when I have come back here, I start to smell. I look down and I am covered with blood.” He wrapped some aluminum foil carefully around the stems of the flowers to keep them moist.
I said, “I heard her father rushed out and tried to kill the driver.”
“Ah! But they stopped him. What good would it do? He was speeding, yes. But they all speed, and he was not expecting a child to run into the middle of the road at ten o’clock at night. He is in prison now and he will pay compensation, you know: blood money.”
He tied a white ribbon around the cellophane-wrapped bouquet.
“He came here this morning with a video camera, the father. He was taking a film of the road. I went out to see and he made interview with me. He wants me to do exactly like what happened. Here the car hit her, like this. Here I pick her up, like this. I run like this. He took a whole film. Everything. The poor man.”
I gave him his money and went home with the roses. I put them in a vase and told Rich all about it, but he was into some book and I don’t think he really wanted to hear. Elaine did, though. I went to see her next morning as soon as I had put Waynie on the school bus. But all the while I was talking, I had a feeling she was keeping something up her sleeve, and sure enough, when I’d finished she said, “And you know what he did in the afternoon, the father? He went down to the morgue, where they were going to wash the poor child and lay her out, and he filmed the whole thing.”
“But how could they let him?”
“They said the poor man was so crazed with grief it was better to let him do whatever he wanted. Besides, they’re afraid of him; he’s a big guy—and violent. And do you know what he did in the evening after you’d left and all the others had gone and only Ingie’s best friend was there?”
Elaine leaned forward with her arms on her knees. “He sat Ingie down and made her watch both his videos: the one on the road and the one in the morgue. And then he made her watch the video of Melody’s last birthday. He said what happened is her fault and she has to be made to feel it.”
Well, that’s weird. Weird enough for me, anyway. They also say he wants her to get pregnant immediately and give him another daughter. And she is not allowed to take little Murat out at all because he can’t trust her to look after him.
Melody was in the morgue for a week while they got her an exit visa and he got leave from his work and then they all flew out to Turkey to bury her in their hometown. Elaine thinks that’s morbid, but I kind of understand they wouldn’t want to leave the kid here on her own when they finally go away. They had a bad time of it, though, because it was that freak five days when all of Turkey and Jordan were covered in snow and the drive from the airport to their hometown took ten hours. Still, I guess that was better than if it had been sweltering hot and all. Anyway, he blamed Ingie to everybody back home and she wanted to stay on with her mother a bit, but he brought her back because he wasn’t going to leave little Murat in her care and because she had to get pregnant. And now they’re here and it’s all a bit spooky. No one quite knows how to talk to them, so we avoid them as much as we can. Everyone honestly thinks they ought to go away. But of course he’s only done four years and he needs to do one more to qualify for the five-year bonus. We all understand that. But we don’t understand her. How can she ever cross that road without thinking of Melody? How can she walk in the gardens? Live in the apartment?
That night I went to see her she suddenly leaned toward me and said, “She was …” Then she turned to the Turkish woman with the spectacles and asked something that appeared to be quite urgent. The Turkish woman looked serious and said, “Good. Not selfish.”
“Yes,” said Ingie to me very earnestly. “She was a good child. Not selfish. A good child.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “So sorry.”
She stared at the carpet. “She was my daughter. Now my house is empty.”
I patted her knee, the one the Egyptian woman wasn’t patting. “You have Murat.”
I left soon after that. Some women were leaving. Others were coming in. I didn’t know it, but Ingie’s husband was fixing up his videos. As I stepped out of the building, the air seemed fresher and the scent of the jasmine was even more strong. The children were still climbing the railings by the pool, buzzing with talk—and I remember wondering, how am I going to break the news to Waynie?
I Think of You
for Nihad Gad
I think of you often. I think of you often, and I remember. I remember, for instance, your old nanny coming into your room, the edges of her tarha caught between her teeth to hide half her face. Her eyes, filmed with cataracts, were so dim she must have been seeing you as though through a mist. I remember your husband turning from the phone, and the small gesture of your hand that stilled the impatient words on his lips. The old woman muttered indistinctly as she moved toward you, her arm describing cramped, arthritic circles with the smoking incense burner. Through the window, the darkness of the Cairo night was so intense, it seemed that if I reached out my hand I would touch black velvet.