by Anna Krien
And now there were the two men.
The bell above the door tinkled as they pushed it open. The shorter, stocky man stood in front, in a brown leather jacket and beige pants, while the other, lankier, in a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, hung back. All the girls had left for the evening, except for Laila, who was mopping the floor. Both she and Nasim froze.
‘We’re closed,’ Nasim said, trying to sound stern, though her heart was hammering. The men smirked at her. Then the short man in the leather jacket nodded at Laila.
‘Is that even halal?’ he said. He returned his gaze to Nasim, watching as she paled and put her hands on the counter to steady herself. He smiled.
‘No,’ she murmured.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Nasim’s head spun and for a few seconds she could only picture the piano, stupid and ugly in the mall.
‘It’s a street piano,’ Robbie had explained that day. A street piano, Nasim now thought viciously. You stupid people with your stupid ideas. And then self-loathing coursed through her: she recalled how she’d sat on the stool like a princess, and held up her hands, silently counting herself in. What had she been thinking? That she could start afresh?
Is that even halal? It was Salima’s saying. Now, in the salon, Nasim did not dare look at Laila for fear the girl might be able to see her ugly truth.
‘Go upstairs,’ Nasim said, keeping her eyes on the men, and Laila ran across the wet floor, feet light on the wooden steps. Nasim waited for the girl’s footfall to end, then said quietly, ‘What do you want?’
*
It was a curious thing to be comforted for the death of a father by that same father, and yet this is how it was for Robbie. She was pregnant, baby Sidney sprouting inside her like a mung bean, although at the time she did not know it.
Robbie had already performed the repetitive dance with the dementia patients when she’d arrived that morning. In reception: What day is it? Tuesday. Near the dining room: When is the milkman coming? Very soon. In the hall: What time is my son arriving? I’ll find out. Outside Banksia Ward: I’ve misplaced my keys. Here they are, Robbie said, handing them a set of pretend keys from a bowl on the sideboard. It’s my birthday. Happy birthday, she recited. Once she brought the birthday woman a present, a little painted box she’d found in an op shop with a brooch inside it. The woman’s eyes lit up when she saw it. ‘You remembered!’ she exclaimed, hugging herself.
Robbie stood in the doorway of her father’s room, a chain strung across it to stop the walkers. They were prone to stealing things while the bedridden patients watched in despair. Sometimes the walkers would pee in a corner, women raising their nighties to squat. But the flimsy chain seemed to deter them from entering.
Robbie looked in. Her father was sitting up in bed, hitting himself monotonously in the face. It was a new thing, this hitting – the nurses said that towards the end, the disease would progress quickly, and sometimes when the patient briefly stabilised he or she could develop strange ticks. It’s a self-soothing thing, said one, suggesting the family could try rocking him instead. Robbie did this now, approaching him carefully and bundling her father’s hands in her own, holding them down. He tried to wrench himself away but she put her other arm around him firmly. ‘Shh,’ she said, the white dandelion fuzz of his hair against her cheek. ‘Shh.’
Dementia, she had learned, was as much about training your own brain as it was accepting the patient’s feckless ways. You had to, in a way, mimic them, make your thinking similarly slippery, eel-like; a habitual, amnesiac way of living. It was theatre, she’d once told Jack, a weekly role she had been playing for a very long time. ‘I’m like Alf in Home and Away,’ Robbie said. ‘I’ve been in this show so long people can’t even remember how I started off.’
Jack laughed lovingly, reaching out to draw her to him. ‘Maybe there’ll be a big reveal in a later episode,’ he said, ‘and you’ll go back to being his daughter.’
Robbie remembered Jack’s words as she rocked her father, and perhaps it was this that set her off, or maybe it was the hormonal shift taking place in her body, or a premonition that it wouldn’t be long now, but she began to cry. Her tears fell fat and slow, landing on her father’s hair, and she felt him stiffen. She could sense without looking the stricken expression on his face, feel the pull of his hand under hers, wanting to find his buzzer. But she couldn’t stop. She let him go, waiting for the electronic beep to summon the staff. But instead she felt the tentative tips of his fingers, his touch wary on her arms, and then braver, his hands on hers.
‘My dad,’ she said suddenly, her voice thin, and it came out of her, unplanned, a truth and a big terrible lie. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my dad,’ she said. ‘He died.’ And her father put his arms around her, shyly, giving a light pat on her back. ‘He’s dead,’ Robbie said again, a warble of hysteria in her voice.
He began to rock her, his hands firm now, his chin gentle on her head. ‘Shh,’ he said. His fingers were in her hair and he whispered, just like she’d done, ‘Shh, shh,’ holding her like she was a child, as though he remembered how.
He died five months later. He was ragged by then. He had lost his voice, could only rasp a breathy ‘ha, ha, ha’, eyes milky with blindness.
Beverley came to see him towards the end. To say goodbye would be a stretch, as she’d never had the opportunity to say a proper hello, having only met him in his demented state, but it was a farewell of sorts. Her daughters were with her, walking either side of the large, dignified woman. Beverley greeted Robbie, Otis and Claire, clasping their hands, and chuckled to see Robbie’s inflated belly. Then her daughters, as if choreographed, located a chair, slipping it under the older woman’s bottom next to Danny’s bed, placing their hands beneath her arms to ease her descent. Beverley spoke softly to her brother and sat for a long time, holding his hand. Finally, she said something in language, a rugged rolling of vowels.
‘What did you say?’ Robbie asked when the woman stood up, the daughters solemn sentries at her side.
‘Sleep well, big brother,’ Beverley answered. Tears sprang to Robbie’s and Claire’s eyes. Otis looked away. Beverley cleared her throat, looking steadily at Claire, her eyes piercing. The woman was going to ask something of them, Robbie could sense it. Something that would hurt.
‘Can we bury him?’ the woman said. Robbie sucked in her breath as Otis looked up, startled. Beverley showed no sign of noticing, continuing to look at Claire. ‘We would like to return him to his mother,’ she said.
There was a heavy silence, and Robbie felt suddenly woozy. She put her hands on her belly, and Claire put her hand out too, her arm stretching across Robbie and Otis, as she would do in the car if she had to brake quickly and one of them was in the front passenger seat. Claire’s eyes searched her children’s.
‘No,’ she said at last to Beverley. ‘He’s ours.’
There was another silence as Beverley shifted her gaze to consider the siblings. Otis looked at the floor, but Robbie returned the woman’s stare.
After a moment Beverley nodded. She swept her eyes over them and back to Danny, then led with her chin, footsteps slow and deliberate, to the doorway. But one of the daughters would not move. She stood, her expression resolute. Beverley stopped. ‘Come on, Penny,’ she said, looking back, but the girl shook her head. She sharpened her gaze on Robbie. ‘No, Mum.’ They were likely the same or a similar age, the girl and Robbie. Cousins, if they willed it.
The girl sized Robbie up, widening her stance, and Robbie felt a tiny shock. She’s like him, she realised. When Danny had shadow-boxed in the courtyard of their old house, he’d showed Robbie and Otis his stance and made them stand in front of him, giving a surprise shove to see which foot they would put out to save themselves from falling. ‘You’re goofy,’ he’d said with a laugh to Robbie, when she put out her left. Then he showed them how he tucked in his chin, pinning his elbows to his sides to protect his ribs, and put his right fist up to guard his face. ‘Your strong arm stays in
the rear,’ he said, ‘unless you want to fight like a mud crab.’ Then he danced – at least, that is how it seemed to Robbie. She loved watching him, his left fist in front, popping it out and back, seeking out pockets of air as he hopped on his feet, his right fist glancing like a shadow of the former. He seemed to repel light and flatten shade, and in spring she would shadowbox with him, geranium on the breeze and new butterflies unfurling, their wings setting before flying off on ribbon routes, and her father would seem briefly happy. There was a similar steely insouciance to the girl, her father’s niece, as she glared at Robbie.
‘Our grandma loved him,’ the girl said, her fists clenching. ‘They took him away. They made sure she had nothing, then said she couldn’t care for him.’ Robbie tried to look away but the girl shifted, finding Robbie’s gaze. ‘She said it was like a piece of her had been carved off, like they had pulled out a hunk of her flesh. She didn’t know where he was, if they made him work or just fed him to the dogs, or what.’ The girl paused, her eyes angry, the irises a stormy grey. ‘Every time someone died she would study the pictures in the papers to make sure it wasn’t her son. My grandma had a hole in her – she had it every day of her life after losing him – and we can put him back. It shouldn’t be up to you.’
Robbie frowned. She hated the girl. She stared at her, then at Beverley. Fuck you, she wanted to say. Fuck you. He is ours. She didn’t say anything. She looked down, glaring at the vinyl floor until they left.
*
‘Shh, I can hear the sea,’ a child had said to his mother on the day the purple piano appeared. Nasim and Robbie had overheard him as they walked past, smiling when the boy flattened his palm over his mother’s mouth, cocking his head at her to listen. Above them, the pale green gum trees whispered. There was no sea; it was a hazy, hot suburb of concrete in the north with a bluish-grey graph of skyscrapers jutting out of the horizon like a crystal growth. The boy was hearing the whoosh of the wind, leaves rubbing together like dry skin, but the mother didn’t say so. She shared an amused look with the two passing women.
There was such sweetness in the day. It had rained in the night and everything felt washed clean, the quartz in the bitumen sparkling in the sunshine. Beneath the footpath, it was almost possible to feel the roots of the stunted shrubs stretching and drinking. It all seemed to mesh: the slow turn of lamb spits, rugs with Arabic books laid out on them, men crouched easy on their heels, cigarettes parked on their lips as they fingered the pages. When Nasim had arrived in Australia she’d missed Baghdad so much, the feeling had coiled up inside her like a sickness. There were times she had been wracked with a pain so physical that she was convinced she was dying. It was the girl who had brought her here, persuaded her to get on a rattling tram, travel through the city and out the other side, where the appearance of Arabic shop signage made Nasim’s chest start to flutter.
It had been a mistake. But how was the girl to know?
The existence of such a place was no surprise to Nasim – of course she was not the only one here – but her reaction? This was a shock. Her eyes shone as clusters of veiled women got on and off the tram. It’s the language, she thought. The humming haggle, the voluptuous voices that swung out, vowels elongating like swaying hips, the tap of qs like teacups to saucers. Getting off the tram, Robbie led Nasim through an arcade, past a boy feeding coins into a mechanical horse, and into a market. A tangle of voices had washed over her. Guttural rich Arabic, words cantering outwards, queries never left hanging, always finding a response. Standing on the concrete floor that sloped towards various drains, Nasim had closed her eyes. What could she hear? There was some Syrian; Turkish, too. Some Zazaki, Pashto, Kurdish; there was Farsi, Urdu, and oh! It was Iraq! She peered into the marketplace, trying to place the speaker – from the north, Mosul perhaps. Then she heard a word – Baghdad – and it was like gold running through her veins.
‘Are you okay?’ came Robbie’s voice.
Nasim shook herself from reminiscence. ‘Yes,’ she replied, trying not to stammer. ‘I just remembered something.’
Robbie grinned. ‘How long had you forgotten it?’
Nasim stared at the girl, puzzling over her youthful wisdom. It seemed so unearned, which was a mean thing to think, perhaps, but Nasim did not intend it like that. ‘It feels like forever,’ she answered finally.
The two women walked around the market and Nasim breathed in the men, their familiar odour of sweat, thumbed newsprint, fermented vinegar and chickpeas. She took in the women, their woody perfume, with notes of rose. At stalls, people were selling dimpled copper bowls, ladles; in nut and legume shops, there were plastic containers of Bahārāt, baskets of Babylon dates, tall bottles of rose-water and cranberry molasses. One shopkeeper had placed a halved pomegranate on his counter, its red jewels glinting. Nasim felt her chest split, not unlike the pomegranate; she could feel all the honeycomb chambers of her heart burst.
When she saw men and women lay their cheeks on watermelons like children about to fall asleep, gently drumming the thick rind with their palms, the recollection was sharp. Several years after Nasim received her mother’s body from Abu Ghraib, she had managed to source some of her mother’s chapbooks. In souks she crouched with men, poring over piles of books, searching for her mother’s name. It was in one of her earlier collections: In the marketplace, Nhour Amin had written, we listen to watermelons like lovers, a husband’s ear pressed to his wife’s pregnant stomach.
Nasim put her hand in Robbie’s and squeezed it. ‘Thank you,’ she said, for, like most animals would if given the chance, Nasim had decided to stay in this northern suburb, a tiny pocket of home. For all its reckonings, this was the only habitat she knew.
Shh, I can hear the sea.
A long time ago, in Baghdad, Nhour Amin had told her daughter she played piano without heart. She was cruel like that. Nhour loathed pretence, did not believe one ought to feel one’s way around the truth. ‘If truth is a bomb, then let it explode!’ she’d say. Her mother was right: as a girl, Nasim, while technically brilliant, lacked a depth that could not be taught. She could coerce everything from a piano – obedience, timing, tricks, glory – except life. Perhaps it was this blandness that ensured she kept her extremities under the regime, while her father had his fingers amputated and her mother lost her tongue. And so it was curious, after so many pianos Nasim could not coax into life, that it was a purple street instrument, with its damp, out-of-tune innards and birdshit tableau, that ultimately yielded.
Nasim played the pedals first, levering them in and out to quicken the action, the keys flinching at the mechanism. She pressed a single note then, the sound shivering out of the creaking wooden box. She glanced around the mall nervously, but no one was listening, groups of old men dipping sweetbread into their coffee, women kissing the powdery remnants of cakes from their fingers. Only Robbie was paying attention, a surprised look on her face. Nasim’s hands hovered, fingers dangling. She saw the notes in her head, tapping out a classical composition – Bach perhaps, or Gershwin, as she’d practised over and over for the academy. Then she saw another kind of song: the folk songs she’d played at Nostalgia, women undulating like sand vipers as the men clapped their thighs. Does it even exist, she thought, the music I want to play? Then she recalled Nhour, her mother who could not read music but marked the piano keys so as to remember her made-up melodies. It did exist.
Nasim lowered her hands and remembered.
At first it was the simple patter of rain, the notes sparse, and slowly people in the mall began to look up, some at the sky. Then the notes fell heavier, shiny droplets of sound, and over the top came the twisting melodies, Arabic maqams, those scales the teachers at the academy had openly scorned, and then hidden their scorn for fear of being butchered. There had always been a severity to Nasim’s playing, and in Coburg this had not changed. She felled each note, sometimes letting it linger for a moment, other times deftly flicking the key upwards with the underside of her index finger, cutting it short. Bu
t she was whirling, dancing, and at times her fingers slipped in her sweat, stumbling to another note, strangling a chord. When this had happened in her youth, a brief shame would bloom in her chest each time. Play on, her mother would say to her in the days she listened to her daughter practise, and Nasim wouldn’t; she’d start from the beginning, as a composition ought to be flawless. Yet here, she played on. Was this playing with heart? For Nasim ached; she leaned into the piano, her feet paddling the pedals, and she wanted to kick the instrument hollow, she wanted to punish it and she wanted to drown in it, swallow the notes.
And she played on.
She played for her father’s amputated fingers and her mother’s razored-off tongue. She played for the girls she broke in, for the rank brownish blood each of them found in their underpants from whoring. She played for her concertinaed city, its olive-eyed citizens and dreams made of silt and clay. And into the melodies of her mother, she played her own history.
Nasim knew everyone in the mall was listening. She’d long learned how to feel an audience’s attentiveness. It was an energy in the air. A woman, her blonde hair tied back, came near the piano with her child, and in the incongruous way of so many of these Australians, encouraged her daughter to dance, but the girl couldn’t find the beat. When the mother tried, nor could she. It was as though the Arabic rhythm was a Western misfit, putting sound where there should be silence, and vice versa.
*
Not long into the occupation, the Iraqi Symphony began to rehearse again. They passed through security, opening their cello and violin cases for the American soldiers, then moving into the theatre Saddam had used for his Ba’ath Party functions. Nasim had gone, braving the street-by-street warfare, hurrying along the blocks, telling children not to play in the debris, their legs dusted in the powder of fallen buildings. She stood outside the convention centre gates, near the razor-wire and sandbags, watching the musicians enter. It was here that Saddam had held loyalty meetings, reading out the names of traitors, weeping as if filled with sorrow at their treachery, watching them being led away.