As if she realizes she’s gone too far, Rupa suddenly looks thoughtful, maybe even pained. “Sabine,” she goes on with surprising tenderness, “I’m sorry. I mean, I actually feel sorry for you. You can’t sleep, you can’t let go of yourself. And maybe you just can’t fall in love.” Rupa grows quiet for a moment; her face softens, her hands come up to stroke her own hair unconsciously, naturally. “But don’t you ever think about what it could be like, if a Client fell in love with you? Don’t you ever think about what it could be like if you could marry and live in Green City normally again?”
Diyah puts her hand on my arm, either as comfort or warning, I can’t tell. I shrug it off. “I never think about that,” I mutter. I can’t explain why I become so nervous listening to Rupa. Does she know something about Joseph and the way he acts around me? I’ve only confided in Lin about his behavior. The last thing I want is for anyone to believe that I provoke his obsession with me on purpose. “Neither should you. It’s impossible.”
“I’m not ashamed of it,” says Rupa. “You can’t choose whom you love. I never thought this would be forever, anyway.” She waves her hand, taking in the room, Diyah, me, the Panah. Everything Lin’s done for her, everything we’ve been through together means nothing to her compared to the mirage of departure she’s designed in her own mind.
“You can’t get out of here, unless you leave Green City for good,” I say. “There’s no way you can float around outside. They’ll find out about you, capture you and you’ll be declared—”
“I’ve got Clients who can fix the records,” Rupa interrupts, raising a hand haughtily, like a traffic warden stopping my voice.
I laugh. “Nobody’s ranking goes high enough that they can fix the records. Change things, fudge them, hide things here and there, but erase them forever? Not possible.”
Rupa fixes her eyes on me. There’s a strange light in them, and I wonder for just a second if there’s something to all her braggadocio. “Sabine, my Clients are more powerful than you can even imagine.”
I push away my broth half finished and stand up from the table. The bowl clatters, soup spilling out on my fingers. I don’t flinch, don’t grimace, don’t let out a sound. I keep my reddened hands at my sides and turn away from her pretty, sulky face. I’m not going to argue with her to provide entertainment on another boring afternoon. Finally she gets up and stalks out of the room. She slams the door when she goes.
I sit back down.
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m not normal. Maybe I am a freak.”
“She’s not right about you. Or about love,” Diyah’s calm, cool voice brings me back to shore. “That you can’t choose. You do choose. You choose every day.”
“How do we...”
“I mean you, Sabine. It would be so easy for all of us to become bitter, to hate what we do, where we are, like Rupa.”
“She can’t help herself.”
“Yes she can. She could be more like you. You wake up every morning and you decide to put your energies and attention into making our little world a little better. You put fresh flowers on the table so that it looks nice. You always have time to listen to us when we have problems. You even laugh at my jokes!”
I’m embarrassed by Diyah’s reassurances. All the years I’ve been in the Panah, I’ve thought of living here like putting currency into an account. I’m stuck, so I have no choice but to invest more and more of my heart and soul into it. And the more I invest in it, the more difficult it becomes to hate it, or hate anyone else who lives here with me. Rupa resists even now, making an already difficult existence even tougher to bear. She still dreams of escape, while I only dream of survival.
I lower my voice and lean close to Diyah’s ear. “It sounds like Rupa’s in love with one of her Clients.”
“I think it’s more than that,” whispers Diyah grimly.
We look at each other nervously. We don’t dare speak our fear aloud. If Rupa’s been having sex with a Client, she’s truly lost her mind. Lin would throw her out in an instant. But then if that happened, Rupa would be dangerous. Who knows where she’d go or what she’d do, released from this sanctuary?
“I just can’t figure out who she would let...” continues Diyah.
“Not an ordinary Client.”
“No. Someone really big. She said so. Someone high up. But who?”
Words stop coming into my head for a minute. I don’t know what to do with this sudden burst of information from Diyah.
Everyone seems to like telling me their secrets. My sleeplessness sets me apart, like a temple virgin. When you’re deprived of your most basic needs, you live on a different plane, as if your atoms are vibrating at a different frequency. Or maybe I draw their secrets to me like magnets because I’m made of darker matter than they are.
Diyah stirs her spoon inside her empty bowl, tapping it to emphasize her words. “If Rupa says she loves a Client it’s because she’s chosen to love a Client. Because he’s her bridge to another place. She can say she’s attracted to him, she wants him, she can’t help herself.” Her voice is soft, hypnotic, as if she’s talking to herself more than me. She seems to stare at something very far away, something only she can see. “Rupa thinks she’ll get away from here through love.”
“Or sex.”
“Sex is love, if you do it right. But Sabine, men aren’t doors to escape through, or even mirrors to find ourselves in. We’re fooling ourselves if we think they can help us.”
When Rupa first arrived at the Panah two years ago, she seemed more like a frightened eight-year-old girl than the sixteen-year-old woman she really was. At first, she didn’t talk to anyone, just kept to herself. Finally, Lin told me to keep her company, to sit with her on my free nights, when both she and I found we couldn’t sleep. Naturally, we forged a bond.
The first thing she confessed to me was how upset she was that Lin had made her take out her nose pin. But Lin had her reasons: a nose pin can set off alarms, trigger sensors.
“I know she’s strict, I know it’s for my own safety,” Rupa said. “Maybe I am cheap. I don’t know. I just loved that nose pin so much. My mother gave it to me. I used to bother her all the time for it, and she gave it to me just before I—”
“You’re not cheap,” I said, and drew her close for a hug to which she submitted to reluctantly at first. But then she clung to me like a limpet and cried into my shoulder.
“I miss my mother,” she whimpered.
They lived together in a small apartment in Qanna—Rupa, her mother, and her mother’s two Husbands, whose names she never told me. She only identified them as N and Z, who had both married her mother when Rupa was very young. N was older; he kept to himself, reading his device or listening to news reports late into the night. Z was almost young enough to be an older brother to Rupa. He gave her sweets when her mother wasn’t looking and helped her with her homework.
She told me this as she was massaging my head one evening in my room. She’d made up an evil-smelling concoction of sesame and mustard seed, a folk remedy for dry hair passed down through generations in her family, or something like that. She asked everyone if they wanted to try it, but they all groaned at the smell, except for me. Feeling sorry for her, finally I agreed to be her guinea pig. The oil stung like ant bites and I squirmed away from Rupa, but her slim fingers were surprisingly strong, keeping me captive in the chair as she rubbed the oil into my scalp.
“Come on, it’s good for you. My mother would hit me with a hairbrush if I complained.”
“It’s so messy! And it smells like rotten eggs,” I grumbled.
“But your hair will shine like glass when you wash it,” she said. And she was right. My hair was like moths’ wings, silky and smooth, when she’d finished with me. It made me go back to her again and again for the same treatment, which she administered to me, along with the unexpected pleasure of the scalp massage. I
stopped complaining and learned to ignore the smell while enjoying the sensation of her fingers pressing at my temples and the nape of my neck.
Slowly, over the next several months, she told me about her flight from Green City. At first she only revealed small details, like the fact that her mother was a Religious. “She believed in god, she taught me to fear him. I was afraid of god, but I never loved him the way I loved my mother.”
“You’re lucky,” I told her. “I can’t remember what my mother’s face looks like anymore.”
Rupa made a sound of sympathy. “You’re very beautiful. You must look like her when she was your age. If you want to remember what she looks like, all you have to do is look in the mirror.”
Next time, as she began to run warm water all over my scalp, she was like a little mother hen with her critique of my posture. “So tense, Sabine! Look at your shoulders, all cramped and stiff. You can’t be pretty if you’re stressed all the time.”
“Is that your secret?”
“Me? I was so ugly and scrawny when I was little, but my mother prayed for me every night to become pretty.”
“It worked!”
“Too well,” said Rupa with unconscious candor, and her hands suddenly stopped moving in my hair. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear the darkening in her voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Growing into looking better only took away my peace.”
Rupa eventually told me that when she came down to breakfast one morning soon after her fifteenth birthday, her family members stared at her as if she were a stranger sitting in their daughter’s chair. And her mother? “She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. She was so grateful, her eyes said it all. I’d make better marriages than she had, you see.”
Rupa confessed to being enchanted by her own loveliness. Her stepfather N treated her the same as before, an appendage of her mother, or a piece of furniture in the room that he’d gotten used to stepping around. Z made his usual jokes with her at the dinner table, slipping her sweets when her mother’s back was turned. But when he thought Rupa wasn’t looking, he would glance at her furtively, not just at her face, but at her body—legs, hips, breasts. And then he would break away and talk innocently to Rupa’s mother. It turned Rupa’s cheeks crimson, filled her body with shame.
“I began to get nervous around him. Why did he look at me like that? And he was starting to slink away from me more often, talking less to me than before. My mother noticed, too. She’d always been very strict that I should never let anyone touch me, that sex was only for married women. It’s in the religious rules, but I guess the Bureau thinks it makes sense for everyone.
“She told me to go to my room and study, but Z was always watching me, whenever I bent down to take something out of the oven, or reached up high to bring a box down from a cupboard. At first I thought it meant he still liked me, even though it was different than before. At least I wasn’t a stone or a shoe.”
There were no girls-only schools where Rupa lived, so she went to the regular school in a different neighborhood, the only girl in a class full of boys. She wasn’t allowed to take part in the physical activity sessions; she was sent for a few hours every day to special classes on Civic Duties, a class conducted by a Wife of one of the Perpetuation Bureau officials. I’d gone to a class like that too. We watched endless films about housekeeping and the science of childcare. They thought that by calling us household engineers and domestic scientists, we’d be fooled into thinking our “jobs” were worthy of our intelligence and self-respect. In reality being a Wife was endless drudgery, washing and wiping and feeding and cleaning, spaced between unending pregnancies.
Rupa confessed that once upon a time she thought everything they told her was perfectly normal; she even daydreamed about the Husbands she’d be assigned, the children she’d bear to make Green City strong again. For the few girls of Green City, the ones fortunate enough to turn into women, it’s either acquiescence or madness.
Then came the morning when Rupa came out of the shower and saw the bathroom door had been opened a crack. Someone was spying on her, but there was nobody at the door when she looked. When she tried to tell her mother that Z was starting to frighten her, her mother threatened to lock her in her room. She promised never to talk about it again, and Z left her alone for a few months.
Rupa dried my hair gently with a towel, her voice neutral, as she told me that several months later Z started to come into her room at night, after her mother had fallen asleep. His hands would roam all over her body and she’d lie there, terrified and silent under his touch. In the mornings he’d act as if nothing had happened. Every night he came to her room, but Rupa kept silent, fearing a beating from her mother if she revealed something so fundamentally wrong. It was worse that her mother wouldn’t believe her, that she willfully closed her eyes to Rupa’s torment.
Weeks passed and the molestation continued. Z grew more bold, coming to her room even in the day. At night he seemed more and more determined to edge towards the ultimate goal of taking her virginity. The night he tried to take off all her clothes terrified Rupa out of her silence.
“I thought that getting beaten was still better than letting him do what he wanted. I couldn’t bear it, so I finally told my mother that it had been going on for months.”
She had forgotten to remove the towel from my shoulders, she was so caught up in her story. She spoke so softly that I had to lean forward to hear. “I thought my mother would kill me on the spot, but she was quiet. Then she went to her room. I couldn’t move. Finally she came out and said I wouldn’t go to school that day. N went to work, then Z left as well. I tried to study but couldn’t concentrate. I gave up and lay down in my bed, looking at the wall.
“Z came home and my mother gave him his meals in his room. He didn’t come to my room for two nights. The third day, my mother took me into the drawing room. ‘Sit down, Rupa,’ she said. I thought she was ready to talk to me. I thought there would be no secrets between us.”
“Did she listen? Did she believe you?”
“She took out her nose pin from her nose, the one I’d always admired, and told me I was finally old enough. At first I didn’t understand what she meant by that...”
I was mesmerized by her story. I couldn’t stop listening to her words. I was gripping the sides of my chair, feeling all the terror that she was speaking about as if it were happening to me, not her.
“She pressed her thumb into my right nostril. She pressed hard with the pin, into my flesh. But I didn’t scream, not even once.”
“She took me by the arm. I’d always thought of her as tiny and delicate, but she pulled me all the way to the door, even though I tried to hold on to the wall with my fingernails. They broke as my mother tore me away.
“There was a black car waiting for me. I cried, I begged, I apologized, but my mother didn’t listen. She pushed me out and locked the door.”
The nose pin, which Lin had finally allowed Rupa to wear only in the Panah, winked and flashed, a third eye on her face. It was her mother’s brand, marking Rupa as both her offspring and her outcast for the rest of her life.
My mind was reeling, my ears ringing with her words. Surely there was something I could say to make sense out of all of this for her, for me? “She was keeping you safe,” I gabbled. “She thought she was doing it for the best, to protect you from him.” It was Z she should have thrown out of the house, not her own daughter. Thoughts of my own mother, of loss and longing, assailed me, and I covered my face with my hands.
Rupa’s face was drained of blood and emotion. “It was all my fault.” Then, seeing how miserable her story made me, she reached out and hugged me.
After the confrontation with Rupa, I go back to my room to rest before my assignation, but when I lie down on my bed I start to cry. I’m not normal, but neither is Rupa. None of us is. Green City stole our
normality, our childhoods, our futures. What is normality anyway? We live in bizarre circumstances; either we cope, or we crack and shatter like glass. The Panah has taught me that much; I’ve learned not to mind my own insanity. But Rupa’s newfound love doesn’t seem to have done anything to heal her or make her happier. It’s only honed her dissatisfaction, and she’s torn my defenses with her casual cruelty.
My tears defeat me, pouring out of my eyes faster than I can wipe them away. In the end, I let the tears soak into my pillow. The love I wanted to give her is a waste; she’s thrown it back at me with both hands. She doesn’t want or need the Panah anymore, now that she’s found true love. She doesn’t need me either, and there’s no feeling worse than that.
From the Voice Notes
of Ilona Serfati
I spend a lot of my time asleep, resting lightly on the earth that will soon claim me for its own.
We don’t bury bodies here in the Panah; we have to incinerate them, using chemicals that reduce our bodies to biological ash in a matter of hours. We thought of everything when we set this place up, even the area in the back of the Panah where our cremations take place. Each woman who dies is buried here, ashes scattered around the trees in the Charbagh. Nurturing and replenishing us with the remains of her existence, her cells and atoms become part of our atmosphere. Fairuza hasn’t left us. And soon I’ll join her. If I see her after I die, I have only two questions for her:
Was it all worthwhile? Was this suffering better than the other way?
Lin doesn’t know, or if she does, she’s closing her eyes to the truth. She keeps talking about the New Year, the plans she has for improving the garden, the lighting system, whether or not we’ll get another girl in the Panah. Sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders and ask: “Don’t you understand the situation? By this time next year I won’t be here.” She averts her eyes from mine, and doesn’t let me talk, the wretched girl.
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