She wanted to buy sandals like the ones his sister-in-law Khadija wore so they went to look for the shoemaker who might have them. How get lost in a village he must have known, roaming every turn and twist, as a boy! Landing at empty lots, abandoned workshops, they didn’t find the shoemaker but in this part of the village she saw as a ruin but was the normal state of lassitude in the extremes of poverty, there was no demarcation between what was the thoroughfare and the shacks where goats were tethered and women squatted in their black garb like crows brought down wounded—suddenly he had to swerve to avoid a dead sheep lying bloated in a shroud of flies. Now she was appalled. Ah poor thing! Why doesn’t someone bury it!
His foot on the accelerator made the violent pressure of an about-turn, churning up stones and sand.
He lies like a corpse and a fly lands on his forehead.
Dead sheep. Rotting.
He is ashamed and at the same time angrily resentful that she is seeing it (over again, he sees her), it will be an image of his country, his people, what he comes from, what he really is—like the name he has come back to be rightfully known by. Not for her; no, that was it.
Chapter 22
Often he was away all day. He left early, for the capital. Things to do there; family matters, she was resigned to suppose: he was back home. The family was a graph of responsibilities to be traced, a tree not of ancestry but the complexity of present circumstances. There was the question of the sister-in-law living in the house, wife of the elder brother who was away over the frontier at the oil fields and whose earnings transferred to support his wife and children had for months failed to arrive from the agency in the capital. There was some problem over the father’s right to a portion of profit from a small rice crop owned by a collateral; no lawyer in the village to regulate these disputes? No. Responsibilities were expected of the return of a son experienced in the ways of a world outside. There was no suggestion that she should accompany him, these were not occasions to explore the city, what was the sense of her hanging about in queues before officialdom.
She rationed to herself the books provided in the elegant suitcase. Might be some time before she and he decided what they would do, their project (the vocabulary of her public relations period slipped in, like an accent discernible in a second-language speaker)—what a new life, here, was going to be.
A child gentle as a moth came in to the lean-to and stood watching her read.
The second time, the child sat down on the floor, so quiet that even her breath was no intrusion. Then the child brought with her the young woman who spoke a little English.
He had made the list.
Maryam—my little sister’s what do you call it, a domestic—she works in a house like my Uncle’s. And my sister Amina, who’s living here with her children, I don’t know what her husband is doing now—what work, if there is any. Ahmad, the tall brother, kills animals for a butcher, you can smell it when he comes in. That water you see being boiled— it’s what my mother always prepares for him to wash himself. The other one, that’s Daood, he is the coffee-maker in a café. My brother Zayd, Khadija’s husband—they say there’s no news, don’t know what’s happening with him. My small brother Muhammad is still at school, he sells cheese to the houses for a shopkeeper, walking everywhere. There, that is my family. Their professions.
It must have been the young sister’s day off—Friday, yes, Julie had seen her prostrate, praying beside her mother that morning. The book was put aside and they began to talk, bridging hesitancy with gestures—Julie, with mime—and laughter at each other’s attempts at being understood. Her Ibrahim had taught her nothing of the language, dismissing even the conventional polite exchanges. They’ll get it although you say good evening and thank you very much. But this young sister seemed to enjoy having the foreigner repeat these banalities become achievements, correcting the awkwardness of a throat producing unfamiliar sounds and lips shaped to expel them. In turn, the young woman slowly arranged the sequence of her English words, and waited attentively to hear of her mistakes. For the meal after midday prayers the child put her hand, a delicate frond of fingers, in Julie’s and led her along with Maryam to where in a room with no defined purpose the women of the house cooked food for everyone on two spirit burners—that feast on the return of the son from seeking his fortune must have come from the Uncle’s house. Julie wanted to help with washing dishes in the tin basins (the flowered ones she’d seen in the market); the ethics of the EL-AY Café did not allow oneself to be waited on except in a restaurant. But the women crowded about to prevent her from so much as putting her hands in water. The mother stood apart; it must have been her direction—from her son?—that this bride he had brought as that fortune from the other world could not be expected to take on what was the lot of women.
Maryam is such a bright girl.
Yes? He really does not know her; she was a child when first he went wherever it was he could pass immigration.
She says she wants to study. Doesn’t seem to know quite what—be a doctor, secretary in a company—glamourized careers she sees on television, for sure. But she is so hungry to learn. Why can’t she have the chance? Why should she be a nursemaid or whatever it is. She has a brain. You somehow got to the university.
Doesn’t she tell you she’ll be married next year. It has been arranged with the son of my father’s friend, the commissioner of police. The son is a policeman. You haven’t seen—they tell me he’s posted somewhere else. She will go there.
Julie echoes his customary conclusion: So that’s it.
She will be a wife. My mother—you can’t talk to her so how can you know. My mother is a very clever woman. She has a brain, as you say.
Oh I see that. It’s there in her face.
But you don’t know how she fought with everyone for education, that girl, forced her father to let her go to school to learn to write and read the Koran. In those days she was the only girl among the boys there. She could read newspapers and books no other girl could. She could say whole parts of the Koran—by heart, is it? Many verses. She still can. But it was arranged, she was married. And here she has been in this house giving us birth, feeding us, boiling water to clean us.
Julie could not understand the hostility in him at such times and could not know that he hardly understood it: whether it was against the bonds of a life he had set himself passionately adrift from, the sorrow that his mother’s life was, to him, and that he failed to change—and now; look at his mother—what would she have been, this image of dignity, all that she had endured and controlled, put down in the streets between the garage backyard and the company of the café table! Or was this animus against her—the tourist who like all tourists didn’t ever know what it was she really was looking at. The sense—the strength—his, in the possession of her, had been in the chance that she, her connections, what she was, would have obtained for him in her country what he could not attain. His animus the protection he must take to guard against that thing, luxury, people who could afford it called love—he found himself yielding to feel, for her. That would be his weakness—the day when she packed the elegant suitcase and went away, this adventure worn thin, as it will. Him the loser, yet again. He’s not for her. Papers refused.
He did not tell her that from the first day what he was doing when he left early on a morning for the capital was seeking out every contact, every strategy of wily ingenuity that could be got out of such contacts, to apply for visas for emigration to those endowed countries of the world he had not yet entered and been deported from. Australia, Canada, the USA, anywhere, out of the reproach of this dirty place that was his.
No point in raising hopes that might not succeed in time: before the adventure was over and the elegant suitcase packed for the EL-AY Café, and the beautiful terrace of her father’s house, although she didn’t care to call that home.
Chapter 23
He is back helping out in his Uncle’s vehicle repair workshop.
Ibrahim i
bn Musa.
The processes of applying for permission to enter someone else’s country from this one are numerous and set no definite period for their conclusion. The verdict—yes or no, and under what conditions—takes even longer. The local consular representative of the country concerned, after the applicant has managed to get past counter clerks and sit before him, has to send all relevant documents back and forth to the Ministry in that country; they slip to the bottom of a pile, get lost in the interstices of a filing cabinet, are wiped out by computer failure, and the process has to start over again. There is no use asking for reasons; and then there are new questions from the Ministry, requiring still further documentation, to and fro. And underlying all this that is taking place openly on stamped forms and computer screens there are other measures, anything and everything that can be tried to wriggle under power-lines of bureaucracy, and that have succeeded, it is legendary, the odyssey of emigration, for some, while failing—he follows their experience every day, with compatriots at a coffee stall—for others.
She has been only the Siren to his Ulysses. Whereas in her country it had been up to her to importune the influential and engage lawyers etc. in the contest with the bureaucracy of authority—an unsuccessful diversion, even if attractive— in this place, this situation back here, he is the one who must have the know-how, or somehow acquire it. What had served him before, when he managed to get some kind of dubious entry to a country, might not—did not—work now; the equivalent national humanitarian symbols of the Lady With The Upheld Torch, like her, no longer welcome but use the Light to frisk each applicant blindingly for possible connections with international terrorism—people fighting their own foreign ideological battles on other nations’ soil, or carrying in their body fluids the world’s latest fatal disease. This country which claimed him by his birth, his features and colour, his language, and the Faith that he had to fill in on forms although he did not know if his mother’s son was still a Believer—this country was well known to have a high rating as a place of origin from which immigrants were undesirable.
She, his foreign wife, was the right kind of foreigner. One who belonged to an internationally acceptable category of origin. When he was simply handed a single form for her application for a visa for any of the countries he favoured, he had now to tell her what his absences in the capital were about.
I started right away to get us out of here.
But where to. She was reading down the form as she spoke. What sort of country.
Does she still believe in choice. But he gave her his slow rare smile that he knew she was, always, moved to coax from him. Any one we can have.
All right for her. For him, her husband, if other ways were to be followed where official ones were going to be a no-no, these cost money. She had no scruples about this so long as bribes could be managed, here, without danger to him; the only reason why this course hadn’t been resorted to back in her country was the warning of the lawyer that he would find himself in more trouble. There were the tourist dollars she had brought with her; her only hesitation was how would he and she continue to contribute food and other necessities—things his mother certainly needed—if the money ran out? The Uncle wasn’t paying him, at present—apparently the old car and free fuel were regarded as compensation for having him back under vehicles. This time the fleet of the provincial administration and now as a mechanic genuine-trained in a big city far from us! —This was the Uncle’s bonhomie that, once she had Ibrahim translate for her, she began to recognize in its frequent repetition.
We’ll be gone before then.
He was fixed in determination as on something palpable, as he stripped himself of jeans and T-shirt. The designer jeans were oil- and dirt-stained now, there were no trade unions with rules for the protection of workers, the kind of business the Uncle owned so profitably did not supply overalls. His determination was an awesome possession she had never seen, never needed to be called forth either in the life of her father’s suburb or the sheltered alternatives of her friends. Never known in herself—well, perhaps when she stood in the cottage before him with two flight tickets instead of one.
She picked up the jeans and shirt, and the simple gesture, could have been that of his mother or sisters, sent him over to her. His naked feet covered hers, his naked legs clasped her, and he smothered her head against his breast as if to stay something beginning in her.
Chapter 24
No-one can say how long it could take. When you grease a palm (or whatever that business is called here) you have to risk whether the recipient-behind-the-recipient can do what he assures—no problem! no problem!—or won’t be seen again, and neither will the dollars.
Life in the meantime.
Life. An unremarked insidious way in which both anticipation and impatience are suspended along with the official refusals and the repeated re-applications to be made. An entry into the state lived by the family, the street that ends in desert, the men sitting at coffee stalls. Everyone is waiting for something that may come sometime—a return from the oil fields, the settlement of an ancient debt, a coup whose generals will not stuff their own pockets—or never.
Julie was teaching English not only to Maryam and the quiet young neighbourhood girls and awkward boys who sidled into the lean-to whispering and making place for one another cross-legged on the floor. Maryam must have mentioned this little gathering to the lady of the house where she was employed; the woman invited the foreign wife to come to tea and be good enough to talk English with other ladies wanting to learn to speak the language. What on earth qualified her to teach! On the other hand, what else did she have? What use were her supposed skills, here; who needed promotion hype? She was like one who has to settle for the underbelly of a car. The books in the elegant suitcase were bedside bibles constantly turned to, by now, read and re-read; she agreed—but in exchange for lessons in their language. Why sit among his people as a deaf-mute? Always the foreigner where she ate from the communal dish, a closeness that The Table at the distant EL-AY Café aimed to emulate far from any biological family. Never able better to reach her lover (husband!—she found it difficult to think of herself as a wife) through some sort of contact with the mother to whom was reserved, she knew long before meeting her in the imposing flesh, a place within him out of reach by anyone else. The Table friends were always cash-strapped, even if she had felt like re-entering the cul-de-sac she once occupied with them, not fair to expect an outlay on purchase and despatch; she wrote to her mother, why shouldn’t she be asked to order through one of those wonderful Internet book warehouses in California a translation of the Koran, hardback. And send it by courier; the village post office was a counter shared with chewing gum and cigarettes in a shop.
Her mother, of all people, yes. Speaking from within the family where she now found herself, he had made it clear she was remiss in not keeping a daughter’s contact with a mother. So there had been an exchange of letters. My crazy girl, I can imagine your papa’s horror … you’re like me, I’m afraid, you just can’t restrict yourself to tidy emotions! But don’t forget, darling, if it doesn’t work you can always get out. She had been amused to read the letter to him but skipped the last sentence. A few days later he asked whether she had answered the letter yet.
No of course not. It’s not going to be a weekly duty, like when I was at boarding school.
Her mother can get some references. From her friends, her husband. He’s an American, isn’t he. It’s necessary for our visas.
Canada, Australia—America too? Every possibility was being worked at through his contacts. The only country where she might have any of use was England; but he already had against him a record of illegal entry there.
The letters of recommendation she requested—at his dictation, he knew so well the form to take—so far had not come from California. But the book by door-to-door service prepaid at high cost did arrive—somehow—with the driver of the bus from the capital; whoever was supposed to take charge of
the package there happened to know the man’s route. She hesitated to ask Ibrahim what the verses were that he had told her his mother knew by heart; Maryam would tell her. There was some difficulty in making her request understood, perhaps not because of language problems but of the girl thinking she must be misunderstanding: what would Ibrahim’s wife want to know these things for?
The Chapter of The Merciful, the Chapter of Mary, the Chapter of The Prophets.
He was out with men with whom he grew up, some friends said to be able to lead him to the hands open behind officials’ backs. There were no hours restricting his quest, no chances of pursuit too unlikely. She was alone with the goose-neck lamp he had bought, saying that at least she could read by the light of some amenity she was used to, while they were in this place. Suras, the footnotes said they were called. She read aloud to herself as if to hear in the natural emphases of delivery which had been the passages come upon—for life— in these choices out of so much advice and exhortation, inspiration, consolation people find in religious texts. She read at random; the verses did not come in the order in which Maryam had happened to name them.
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