She was back at the cottage sooner than he would have thought, and quiet. All I can do is write to him. What else. Who can this creature be who would get such a thing into her crazy head. But the letter was not written. When next day she received her official document, the visa stamped in her passport, something else happened. They had rejoiced, embraced, almost losing their footing together, and then suddenly, grave, he said it.
Now before we go we must be married.
Marriage is for suitable matings in the Northern Suburbs, for Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his wives. Whatever the foreigner might think of The Table at the EL-AY Café, other forms of trust have been discovered to her there.
What for. We don’t need that.
He looked at her for what seemed a long time.
What for. She said it again. We don’t need that. A bit of paper … like the one they wouldn’t give you… to let you stay.
But she felt he would withhold from her his rare smile, for good. Nevermore. The black mirror of his eyes refused to reflect her.
If you must leave with me then we must marry. I cannot take a woman to my family, with us—like this.
Just say the word.
She laughs, with tears.
He took her in his arms and kissed her solemnly as if exacting a vow. Two days before the aircraft took off they went to the Magistrate’s Court and before a marriage officer, the first time he had dared show his face in any place of law enforcement. David from The Table was the required and only witness. They kept away from any celebration, that night, at the café where she had taken him, on impulse, out of the garage, for coffee. He was right about The Table—something left behind, abandoned like the cottage—The Table was no more of use to her, to him and his qualities, than the gatherings at Sunday lunch on Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ terrace.
Let us go to another country …
The rest is understood
Just say the word.
Chapter 17
Ibrahim ibn Musa.
He stands at the foot of the stair where the aircraft has brought its human load down from the skies. Lumbered and slung about with hand-luggage and carrier bags, he turns to wait for her to descend from behind him.
He is home. He is someone she sees for the first time. The heat is a gag pressed across her nose and mouth. There are no palm trees.
Ibrahim ibn Musa. They have traipsed across the stony crunch of the airfield in the shouldering of others, entered an echoing babble in which movement and sound are united confusion, and now are before the immigration booths. A man behind the glass partition lowers his stamp. Ibrahim ibn Musa.
Her visa takes a moment’s scrutiny. The wife; Ibrahim ibn Musa. That’s all; done.
An airport in a country like this is a surging, shifting human mass with all individualism subsumed in two human states, both of suspension, both temporary, both vacuums before reality: Leaving, Arriving. Total self-absorption becomes its opposite, a vast amorphous condition. The old women squatting, wide-kneed, skirts occupied by the to-and-fro of children, the black-veiled women gazing, jostling, the mouths masticating food, the big bellies of men pregnant with age under white tunics, the tangling patterns of human speech, laughter, exasperation, argument, the clumps of baggage, residue of lives, sum of lives (which?), in a common existence-that-does-not-exist. Julie is no different, she has no sense of who she is in this immersion, everyone nameless: only him, officially: Ibrahim ibn Musa.
He was very efficient, speaking his own language, making enquiries, engaging in exchanges of colloquial ease with those he approached. He retrieved the elegant suitcase and the canvas bag, and pushed and shouted to grab the door of a taxi before others could get to it. The drive from the airport to the outskirts of the capital on a pot-holed tarred road was a contest with other vehicles pressing up to overtake one another like horses on the home stretch of a race. She was suddenly exhilarated and laughed, feeling for the hand of this new being. I’m here! I’m here! What she meant: can you believe it? I’m with you.
She dodged about to see through this window and that the silhouette of the city emerging blindingly beyond—to her eyes—the decaying few industrial buildings, vehicle repair shops and tarpaulined nooks under Coca-Cola signs where men sat drinking coffee. White, white, sunlight was white on the cubist shapes of buildings pierced by the index fingers of minarets.
We don’t stay any time in town. We go to the bus station now.
I want to walk about, look at everything.
All right. Not today. There are not many buses where we must go.
The bus station on the periphery of the city was a smaller version of the airport concourse. Only here there were cages of chickens among the bundles of life-time possessions. He discouraged her from going to the lavatory. This’s a dirty place.
You forget that I come from Africa? I’ve camped out all over, stayed in villages, you know my friends—we didn’t exactly look for tiled bathrooms—
His brow twitched with impatience. You don’t know this.
She was overcome with love for him: he is in shock, coming back home. She must make light of his irritation with her. Ibrahim … (trying out the name, listening to it, feeling it on her tongue). So what d’you want me to do? Wet my pants on the bus? But she laughed alone.
Wait. He caught by the arm one of the men in a voluble group and asked something that was enthusiastically answered by all at once. There’s a place we can get coffee just down the road; you can go, while we are there, it will be better.
But the bus? Ibrahim. We’ll miss the bus?
There is half-an-hour.
They had to load one another again, like the donkeys seen on the airport road, and he grasped her firmly by the hand, dodging her through buses, cars, trucks and bicycles, wily as the roving stray dogs. Pulled along, she did not need to look where she was going, her gaze darted everywhere about her, snatching a collage of bright and dark images, a vendor with bracelets of bread up his arms, a hag-face begging, the beautiful hands of a baby holding tight on its mother’s shrouding veil, the bared grin of a man momentarily staring at her, the shop signs with their flourishes touting heaven knows what. But he—it was as if he shut himself away from what he was navigating; he distanced himself as he often had done from that other—how remote—café, The Table where she had taken him. This ‘café’ was a tiny shop perceived as darkness by eyes looking in from the white glare; objects strung across the ceiling and a juke-box winding out loud nasal music.
He—Ibrahim—spoke to the white shape of a tunic (the face of the man could not be made out at once) and had from him permission to use his personal outhouse. Her husband (another new identity) had to accompany her, a strange man could not take a woman there, and she was amused to be led, as across the road, like a child, to a shed with a door hanging from one hinge. He stood outside with his back to her private need; a delicacy that would have made The Table laugh, if it could have seen.
When she came out he drew up his shoulders in distaste for a moment and pinched in his nostrils as he breathed. This’s a dirty place. Said it again, a judgment of some kind, not a passing observation on the concrete-rimmed hole in the ground over which she had balanced herself.
Well I feel better … anyway it’s cleaner than a seat where everyone’s been on the throne. Of course it’s easier for you guys, we women lack the appropriate attachment, I suppose there’s always the risk that I could have fallen in.
Come. We must take coffee.
He does not like this sort of claim by intimacy, this manner of talk doesn’t come well from a woman one makes love to. A woman who was not even considered to be for him.
She was not aware that she had offended his sensibilities but she once again took and squeezed his hand while they sat at a little tin table outside the shop and drank two small glass cups of coffee. I’m here, I’m here. We’re here.
He sees that this—the first cup of coffee at the EL-AY Café, the love-making in her bed, the wild decision to come t
o this place, this country, from which she could not be dissuaded, even—yes—the marriage he then had no choice but to insist on—all this was another of the adventures she prided herself on being far enough from her father’s beautiful house always to be ready for. But how ready, now, for what is at the end of the bus ride.
Chapter 18
They had a bride for him. Of course. Since he was sixteen or seventeen years old there had been a girl marked out. Even before, perhaps; there was a little one all skinny elbows and knees who swung her plait among the children he played with and later she was recognizable, mournful-eyed to attract attention, in the group of girls past puberty. But that one would be out of the way, by now, he had been away too long—there had been refuges other than under the belly of a car, in other parts of the world where he was unwelcome. Girls are married off young in this place that the innocent, this foreign wife thrown against him by the swaying of the bus, called his home: home, you’re home! Her adventure wiped out, for her, the anguished weeks of effort to avoid being relegated to this return. But the lurch and retreat of her soft body against his brought a tenderness in irrelevant distraction, he liked plumpness in a woman, the flesh that takes in the sharp edges and splinters of a man’s fate. This Julie who was not for him had just the right amount of flesh for solace. There it was, a gentle weight every now and then, comforting against his side. He did not know what he was thinking; he did not want to think about whatever it was, lurching his mind this way and that, along with the efforts of the overloaded bus to stay on the road.
He had prepared them; or warned them. He was coming back and it was not as the successful son who had made a better life, the Western life of television version, bringing them a share of it in his pockets and in his person, but as a reject, with nothing but a wife—a foreign woman.
At least she had some money because she was one of those not for him. But how much that would compensate them, reach them, his family, was doubtful because she had the luxury, of those who have always had everything, to pride herself in not taking money from her rich father even if he were to offer it. The credit card and dollar traveller’s cheques in her sling bag representing a limited sum were the preparations made for this adventure just as she was accustomed to do for other trips abroad. Funds that only if she goes back before long will make it possible for her to buy for herself in foreign currency the things she had where she comes from and will find she can’t do without—her essentials are not the essentials of this place.
She’ll have enough to pay for her food and mine, while she’s here. That’s what I, their son, bring back to provide for their old age, for my sisters and their children’s future, and for my young brother who is hoping to follow a path— away—opened by his elder.
And again he does not know what he is thinking, no, feeling, currents of love and resentment crossing the inevitability of the family waiting to greet him.
She was exclaiming, asking questions—what is this, oh look at that—about the desert landscape they were being transported through, all new to her. But for him nothing is changed. It is all as it was; everything he had believed he could get away from.
As he knew they were coming close to the village where there was the image of the family waiting, he looked at her, up and down, in a way that made her turn, smiling enquiry.
Have you got something else to put on. In one of the bags.
Put on? What?
He touched at his breast-bone in the open neck of his shirt. Here. To cover up.
But it’s so hot. Don’t I look all right? She hitched at the shoulders of the indeterminate sort of garment she wore as a comfortable travelling outfit with her jeans, the movement of muscle lifting for a moment into view the soft cupping of her breasts.
A scarf or something.
I don’t see how I can get at things—in our stuff—among all these people, I’ll be tramping over them. Wait. Wait—I’ve got a safety pin somewhere—
She drew together, at the base of her elegant long neck which would some day become flesh-ringed, the openings of the garment and pinned them, with some difficulty, on the inner side of the material so that the pin would not be obvious. All right? All right?
With his eyes down, already preoccupied with some other thought, he signalled, a hand raised from the wrist, that whatever makeshift she had managed would have to serve. She was not at home, now, in the EL-AY Café; she had been determined to come here, to this place. It had its rules, as her father’s beautiful house and the guests who came there had theirs. She had made her choice; here it was. She was the one with the choices. The freedom of the world was hers.
There they were. In his mind. His mother for whom he had wanted to save the garage money, bring away from the yoke of family burdens in this dirty place, dirt of the politics of the rich, dirt of poverty. His father always with half-curled hanging hands of a man who lives only through the expectations he places on those he’s engendered (they must live the life he could not), the brothers left behind, the sisters where there would be one, as usual, swollen with child, the husband knowing his place is not in the foreground, the sister-in-law, wife of the brother away at the oil fields, whose reputation of being difficult he’s heard about; the children, babies when he left who must be gangling by now, the Uncle who no longer has a backyard workshop but a vehicle sales and repair business, the neighbours, witness to everything in each other’s lives, coming to see what this son has brought from the world, his baggage and his strange wife.
Ibrahim ibn Musa. His face drew up in a grimace of pain and anger at the nature of their existence, but his eyes, black as theirs, swam tears across this vision of his people.
Chapter 19
Julie Summers. In the human press of the airport, in the eyes of the man made out with difficulty in his cave of a shop, in the faces turned in curiosity to study her, close by in the bus, it came to her that she was somehow as strange to herself as she was to them: she was what they saw. That girl, that woman had lived all her life in the eyes of black people, where she comes from, but never had had from them this kind of consciousness of self: so that was what home was. She was aware of this with an intrigued detachment. And it meant that when she went forward to his family in this state, with him, the son who belonged to them, she could do so offering herself in an emotional knowledge: if she was strangely new to them, she was also strangely new to herself.
There they were. At the bus terminus, men of the family; they could not have known the exact time of arrival but they were there. The photographs that might have been—he wasn’t sure—among the things he had kept at the garage and that she had never been shown—here they were brought to life. The formal group of men made them recognizable, distinguished from the anonymity of the distracting crowd; apart, they belonged to him, Abdu-Ibrahim, the wave of their joyousness broke over the couple. The elderly men among them, thick-creased faces, but no uncertainty about which was the father, there was a moment of stillness in that face— the moment of unbelief at a longed-for materialization offering itself in the flesh—that made the man unmistakable despite no physical resemblance between father and son. The embraces were long. The rush and chatter of people in the terminus an accompanying chorus; she was caught up in the emotion of these men, did not know if she was part of them or of the chorus. It was as if she had lost sight of Ibrahim. He was presenting her to his father. The man made a speech of welcome, drawn back from the two of them, she felt his attention, he was addressing her, and she opened herself to it while the son, her husband, gave nervous pressures of some sort of impatience or disapproval on her arm as he translated. Speak English, speak English. —The interruption was not heeded.— He can speak a little. At least to greet you.
She jerked her arm against the restraining hand, in dismissal; the hoarse flow and guttural hum of the language reached her on a wave-length of meaning other than verbal. The second elderly man, arms stoutly crossed in confidence over his chest, smiling down upon the ceremonial from some
vantage of his own, was introduced to her—the Uncle. The names of the others could not all at once match the individual brothers she knew of, and there were cousins to be confused with them, as well. Some wore casual Western clothes, others were in the traditional long white tunics that, for her, gave them undefined stature, the whole party made the path of their event out of the terminus and to four cars in which, arguing theatrically about who should go where, they found room for themselves. She sat at the passenger door, sharing the front seat with her husband who was close up beside the Uncle in his, the best car. The others accompanied them in a horn-blowing procession to their destination: the place, the street, the house where Ibrahim ibn Musa came from to the garage round the block from the EL-AY Café.
In a street, people were outside a house, smiling and stirring when the procession drew up blaring, the Uncle’s car in the lead, the other, road-worn ones coming to a stop with shudders and jerks of their battered chassis. More neighbouring male relatives to be introduced, and among them the children of the house. The children stared at the woman Ibrahim brought, giggled, ran away when she laughed and held her arms wide to receive them. The house—its face, facade—she could be aware of only peripherally behind the excited assembly, the carrying of the elegant suitcase, canvas bag and bundles snatched by various hands taking charge. A flat concrete roof with some clutter of living visible up there; women were peering down from behind its wall, eyes eager and smiling.
She passed an empty pedestal flower-urn painted blue, a burglar grille ajar at the door.
Struck from the sunlight outside, centred in blinding dimness was the still darker shape of a solid figure seated on a sofa; the presence of this house.
She was produced before his mother by her husband. The welcome was formal; as her eyes grew accustomed to the change from the sun’s intensity, the hushed room emerged, other women there. The presence—this woman with a beautiful face (she knew it was his mother he would look like) asserted beneath a palimpsest of dark fatigue and grooves of unimaginable experience, addressed her majestically, at length and in their language, but her gaze was on her son and tears ran, ignored by her, down the calm of her cheeks. He translated abruptly, probably omitting elaboration, and then his mother engulfed him, the flight of sisters set upon him, upon the woman he had brought as his wife. And at once her impression of his parents’ house, his home, into which she had now truly been received was broken up by activities that spilled through doorways where people pushed past one another, balancing dishes of food wreathed in steam and sharp-sweet scents. The women were a swirl of their enveloping garments, polyester chiffon and braid, bobbing and dodging; the men were conducting, giving orders. People sat round small tables on the carpet and cushions and ate—the way Ibrahim had given up, in the company of The Table—agilely with their fingers. Not all the dishes could be found room for on the flowered cloths among glass plates and brightly-coloured glasses. There were bowls of fruit and sweetmeats on the television set; small children ate with concentration between the adults’ feet and older ones raced in and out the front door helping themselves on the run. Ibrahim the bridegroom was at his father’s side, Julie the bride was facing him across others, with his mother. She touched now and then at the pin that held her skimpy garment closed at her throat; the breathing of the powerful presence at her side stirred robes rising and falling, ample. The food was delicious; when she had had her fill of couscous and vegetable stew the women brought in mutton chops, salad, and handed round the honeyed sweetmeats; she at least knew enough to observe the etiquette that here it was impolite to refuse anything offered; the strength of the coffee helped, long part of therapy after other kinds of indulgence, left behind. Sweet synthetic drinks took the place of wine; to signal her closeness she had lifted her glass to him, down there among the men, calling for his rare and beautiful smile—but it did not come, his glance met her a moment but he was apparently answering questions from his father and brothers. It was the Uncle who made him smile, booming laughter through a full mouth as he told what must have been a joke or made a salacious remark—this was, after all, a kind of wedding feast as well as a son’s home-coming. One of the sisters shyly spoke English when urged by the women, in their own language, to come up to Ibrahim’s bride. There was a phrase-book exchange so that the foreign newcomer to the family might not feel left out—the men were confidently animated among themselves, round the returned son, the women preoccupied with the replenishment of food, chattering softly as they moved swiftly about.
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