All That's Left to Tell

by Daniel Lowe

  After she stopped speaking, he was aware that he was clenching his eyes, not in pain, but out of the effort of trying to imagine Claire in this place. He was holding his mouth open, as if he could breathe in the possibility.

  “I’ll be back later tonight,” the woman said. “Azhar will be here this afternoon.”

  After she left, Saabir untied his hands and removed the blindfold, and for the remaining hours of the morning the walls felt so familiar that they were like a second skin.

  4

  Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Marc sat with Azhar in the rising heat; at times, Azhar dozed in his chair, his gun slipping down his shoulder to the floor, and it occurred to Marc that, in the right circumstance, it would have been relatively easy to slip out the door if he had any chance of knowing where he was once he got outside. He wasn’t sure what that circumstance would look like, but he imagined himself running down one of the narrow roads, taking hold of someone’s sleeve, and pleading into an impassive, uncomprehending face.

  Azhar left the room frequently to bring in cups of water for both of them, along with plates of food in the early evening. Azhar ate quickly and then watched Marc carefully portion out on the plate each spoonful of grain. Toward nightfall, Azhar lit a lantern, and the light fell across his hands as he held his cup, and Marc saw a heavy scar between two of his knuckles and other places where there had been nicks or cuts that had healed. When Azhar saw him staring at them, he put his cup down and held his hands up for Marc to see, turning them at the wrist. The lines on his palms were long and dark.

  “So you work as a butcher, Josephine says, and then you spend hours on end watching over me so you can catch up on your sleep.”

  He wasn’t sure how much Azhar had understood, but Azhar nodded and smiled at him, and then pointed at the deepest scar. Then with his other hand he made chopping motions in the air, as if he were handling a meat cleaver, and brought the invisible cleaver down between his knuckles so that Marc would understand how the scar got there.

  “Boy,” Azhar said. He pointed toward himself, and then laid his hand flat in the air several feet above the ground. “Boy,” he said again. Marc gathered that Azhar must have cut himself when he was a child and learning the trade.

  “Not a mistake you’d make more than once,” Marc said to him.

  Azhar smiled. He took the gun off his shoulder and placed the tip of it in the area of the dirt floor in front of his chair. He moved it slowly across the floor with careful deliberation, and after a couple of minutes, Marc could see that he was drawing a remarkably accurate outline of a cow. Azhar even added a tail and legs with hooves, and lastly a pair of wide eyes and a mouth turned up into a grin. He tapped the tip of the gun on the cow’s smile and then gestured with his free hand as if to say, “Why not?” He then drew lines through various parts of the cow, cordoning it off into sections. He tapped a section of the cow about two-thirds toward the tail, and then looked up into Marc’s eyes and with a smile on his face began chewing slowly, savoring something imaginary, and then with his fingertips starting at the corners of his mouth, ran them down into his beard as if the juices of the meat were overflowing. “Good,” Azhar said, and Marc realized he was teaching him which parts of the cow were most tender and flavorful.

  Marc stood up from his chair, and Azhar didn’t raise the gun as he had during the first days. Marc knelt next to the drawing and pointed to the section at the rear end of the cow.

  “What about here?”

  Azhar nodded, and then cupped his hands in the shape of a bowl and hollowed it out with his fingertips. He then used his finger as a knife as if he were cutting pieces, and then stirred it with an imaginary spoon.

  “Ah, soup,” he said. “Good in a soup or stew.”

  Azhar grinned. He said the word in Urdu.

  “You’re a good man, Azhar, even if you are a terrorist.”

  But this was a word Azhar recognized, and he frowned and touched the shoulder strap that held the gun.

  “I’m sorry,” Marc said, and then knelt back on the ground and drew a crude image that was supposed to look like Azhar, and then images of small children—stick figures, really—behind him.

  “How many children do you have?” he asked.

  Azhar smiled again, and held up three fingers, and with his free hand held up two, and said, “Boy.”

  “Two boys and a girl,” Marc said, nodding.

  Someone knocked on the door then, and Azhar stood up and pulled the blindfold and rope from his salwar kameez. He tied Marc’s hands first, lacing them carefully, and then wrapped the blindfold around his head, passing his fingers on the surface over Marc’s eyes in order to smooth out a wrinkle. Marc heard him open the door, exchange a word with the woman, and then close it behind him.

  She stood for a while in front of him as if she were surveying the situation, and then Marc realized she must have been looking at Azhar’s sketch of the cow.

  “He was teaching me about his trade,” he said. “Showing me the best cuts of beef.”

  “So I see,” she said.

  “You can’t blame him. My god, he sits here for hours on end with nothing to do. He must be bored out of his mind.”

  “It looks like a petroglyph.”

  “A what?”

  “A petroglyph. Like a cave drawing. I’ve seen them in different places here. This reminds me of an elephant I saw in the north that was etched onto this blue stone. There were the same kinds of lines dividing it into parts.”

  He had taken a trip to Arizona once where he saw similar drawings, though they weren’t in caves. Images of animals, some quite beautiful, and human handprints.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “You don’t think of the ancient history of a place like Pakistan when you’re thinking about coming here.”

  “No,” she said. “Most people don’t. It’s a beautiful landscape conquered by many. The Aryans, the Greeks, the Mughals. The British. Now Americans think of it as foaming at the mouth.”

  “Which it is, sometimes.”

  “Like everywhere else, and never only that. Because the truth is, here we have this butcher who drew a perfect image of a smiling cow. And someone taught him this. You can think of the country that way, too.”

  She sat down in the chair where Azhar had been sitting without moving it closer because she didn’t want to destroy the drawing.

  “We’ll have to sweep this away before Saabir comes in.”

  “Not an art lover?”

  “Ha. No, it’s not that.” She was silent for a few seconds. “Do you know, if you were to be killed, it would probably be Azhar, and not Saabir, who would do it?”

  The thought had occurred to him, especially given Azhar’s profession.

  “Does that mean you have some news for me?” he asked.

  “No. As I told you before, things can change quickly here.”

  For the first time, he recognized her vulnerability in her work. If he were to be discovered, she was unlikely to live much longer herself.

  “And if someone decided you should be killed?” he asked.

  “There would be many who would volunteer.” She sat quietly for a while. “So have you been thinking about Claire?” she asked.

  He shifted his feet, and somewhat absently strained at the rope around his wrist, which loosened slightly.

  “I don’t want to think about her.”

  “You seemed transported this morning.”

  “I wouldn’t say transported. It feels good in the way a dose of morphine does, in that it makes the pain go away for a while.”

  “Was she an affectionate little girl?”

  “I—” he started to protest. “All little girls are affectionate.”

  “That’s not true, you know.”

  “Well, were you?”

  “I could be. I liked exploring. Finding things. Presenting them to my mother.”

  “I assume you loved her?”

  But she ignored this question. “She k
ept many of them. We lived near a school with a playground, and some nights, when the other children had been called in or had gone home, I’d go out and sit in one of the swings, kick myself high, and survey the playground for anything they had left. It was about what you’d expect. A Popsicle stick. The missing limb of a doll. Kite string. If it interested me, I’d jump off the swing and pick it up and bring it back to my mother, who would arrange them into some kind of display that she’d place for the evening on the windowsill. So if I was lucky enough to find the cracked eggshell of a killdeer, and, say, a gum wrapper and a ribbon, she’d wind the ribbon into a kind of crude nest, place the broken shell in it, and cut out of the wrapper a small chick that she’d place in the shell. Next morning, when I got up, it would always be gone.”

  “This was in upstate New York?” But it was another question she ignored.

  “One time I was looking through the attic of her house, and opened a small box that had my name on it. And there they were, a tangle of these things I’d brought to her from that time. An assortment of junk, really. A dirty flip-flop. A mitten. Two or three toy cars. But what was strange was how few there actually were, and it seemed she’d saved them all, without storing them carefully, or anything like that. The eggshell was in bits. But I thought I’d done this a hundred times, and there were maybe two dozen items in that box. Not much larger than a shoebox, to tell you the truth.”

  “Did you hold on to it?”

  “No. Hardly. All those things were so plain or broken or torn. You can’t reinfuse them with how you marveled at them as a child. If I marveled at them at all. I picked them up because they seemed to please my mother.”

  Behind the blindfold, he saw a fleeting image of a girl hanging from her knees on a bar, reaching for a coin she saw on the ground.

  “So would you describe that as affectionate?” she asked, but he didn’t answer her. “Anyway, so you see how this works, Marc? Do you think that the baby we dreamed up for Claire this morning—”

  “You dreamed up.”

  “No, we dreamed up. Do you think that the baby we dreamed up for Claire today is a girl, and that there’s a school in that highway town out west where her mother and father live, and that she’ll wander around the dirty playground and pick up bits and pieces of refuse left by other children and bring them home to her mother and present them as a prize?”

  “I can’t imagine you as a little girl. I’m sorry. I’ve never even seen your face.”

  “You don’t have to imagine me as a little girl. You have to imagine Claire as having one. And you have to stop trying not to remember her. Why did you refuse to fly back home when you heard she was killed?”

  In the blindfold, he felt the question was as confining as the walls of the room, and as ever present.

  “It wouldn’t have brought her back.”

  She laughed.

  “That’s not the answer. That’s the answer anyone would give.”

  He was sweating now, and couldn’t wipe it from the back of his neck.

  “I couldn’t face it. Please. I was a coward. I am a coward. Like all Americans.”

  “Stop that crap,” she said, so sharply there was a faint echo off the walls. “You may be a coward. But you can’t keep me away with this one-dimensional sarcasm.” He heard her stand up, and he could feel her shadow near him. Was she going to slap him? Then her hand was on his forehead, or rather some edge of her gown wiping away the perspiration, and then her fingers themselves on the back of his neck, and he flinched at their light, calloused touch. She sat back down.

  “Why are you sweating so much? It’s a cooler night than that,” she said quietly. No one had touched him with anything approaching tenderness in months. Then she said, “I think we both know the reason why you didn’t go back home, but it’s such a sentimental illusion.”

  “What is it, then? You tell me.”

  “When the man I loved was killed here—I told you his throat was cut—I was nearby. A few blocks away from where they found and laid out his body. Someone had come and told me, and I was shaking, shaking. Not crying yet. And the impulse I felt—you must have felt this impulse—was to run to the place because I didn’t want to believe it. I wouldn’t believe it until I saw for myself. I’d seen violence at that point. I’d seen the aftermath of a bombing, the blood, the limbs. But I also knew that if I saw his face after what they’d done, I could never remember it in any other way. So I didn’t want to walk those few blocks. I knew he was dead, but I knew if I didn’t go, I would be freer to remember him as he was. Or believe that he might still be alive.”

  “The thing that radicalized you,” he said, but she didn’t respond.

  “So what did you do after that?” he asked.

  “You know what I did. I’m sitting here in front of you. And yes, I was unprepared for it. I’d lived something of a protected life to that point, maybe more so than your daughter. I was unprepared for that depth of grief. But, Marc, it’s a sweet little illusion that by staying in Karachi, by not answering your wife’s calls, that you somehow were keeping Claire alive wherever she may be back home. But it’s sentimental, and she deserves better.”

  He felt his eyes go heavy, but the knot of cold in his chest remained. He thought she was only partly right. “And how is it not sentimental, then? How is it not sentimental to tell the story of a life she’ll never live?”

  “Because it will not be a father’s story for his daughter. It won’t be the idle, hazy dreams a father has when his daughter is young.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because you will tell the story of her past. Honestly, I hope. You’re the only one who holds it now. Forget Lynne, and Claire’s friends, her lovers. Their stories are thousands of miles away, and you may never hear them again. And I’ll never hear them at all. Her story is yours to tell here with me. But the story of the life she’ll never live—that belongs to both of us.”

  “It turns my stomach to think of doing this here. With you.”

  “Good. People spare the pretty details when their stomachs are turning.”

  “I still think you’re waiting for me to say something that you can turn into a ransom.”

  “I’m not saying that isn’t true. And I’m not saying that what I’ve told you about my own life to this point is true, either, and that what I might say in however many days we may spend here will be true. If you ever go home, I don’t want to become a target. But whatever happens to you, it’s not as if my life here is necessarily secure. Claire’s isn’t the only story we will tell.”

  “It seems desperate,” he said.

  But she didn’t respond to this. They sat quietly for what seemed a long time. They were past the hour for the evening prayer, and now he heard only occasional voices in the distance, unable to discern what they were saying even if he had understood the language. Sounds of insects nearby were punctured by a dog that barked three times. Two children passed by, saying, “Shh. Shh.” But someone, probably Azhar, chased them away.

  “After Lynne asked for the divorce,” he said, his voice louder than he’d anticipated, “she called me. Claire called me. From someone else’s phone, I’m sure, because she didn’t want me to have the number. I’d already moved into an apartment in the city, and it was late at night. I couldn’t sleep. Hadn’t slept. I was playing music from twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen, or something like that, trying to pretend that it was sometime other than now. My phone was in my hand, and I was trying not to call Lynne. I was pretty sure she was seeing someone. And it wasn’t that I was enraged, but it was strange how sex mattered again after not mattering for years. I had a physical craving for her that seemed apart from the habit of her. Which is what you miss most. The habit, I mean. Friends had warned me about that. So I was sitting there, probably at 2:00 A.M., three weeks after I’d found the apartment, my phone in hand, on the verge of either calling Lynne, or, because this craving wouldn’t let me sleep, on the verge of speaking to the habit of her—I mea
n, as if there were a person lying on the other side of the bed with whom I could have a conversation—when the phone rings, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I had a fleeting sense that it might be Lynne, that we were somehow lying awake on opposite sides of the city conversing with the habit of each other, but it wasn’t her number that came up, and no one else would be phoning that late. A wrong number, I was sure. But I answered, anyway, because any voice would have been better than none. And it was Claire.”

  “How long had it been since she’d called?” the woman asked. It struck him that, in the blindfold, it was easy to imagine he was still sitting in that apartment.

  “I don’t know. A long time. Weeks. Maybe two months. I had to ask Lynne if Claire even knew we were separated. She wasn’t exactly calling Lynne for a daily mother-daughter chat, either. But that night, when I answered the phone, the first thing she said was ‘Daddy.’ Which she hadn’t called me since she was probably nine. I suppose I spoke her name like it was something holy. She didn’t say anything in response, so I said, which is what I asked anytime she called, ‘Where are you?’ She said, ‘You always ask that, Dad. I’m sorry I’m calling so late.’ As if we’d talked just yesterday. ‘So late, Claire?’ I said. ‘Are you kidding?’ She was quiet for a few seconds, and then she said, ‘I’m calling to say I’m sorry about you and Mom. It must be hard for you, living away from that house.’ Which struck me as an odd thing to say. ‘The house? I don’t miss the house.’ ‘Yes you do,’ she said. ‘You worked hard on that house. Painting and fixing things. And now there’s another man sleeping in it.’ My heart turned over, and I asked, ‘Who?’ but she didn’t answer. I heard someone on her end, and she turned away from her phone and quietly said, ‘No. Shh.’ I hadn’t overheard the question. She seemed to be walking somewhere, because her voice kept changing modulations. ‘Are you coming home sometime?’ I asked. ‘Sometime, Dad.’ And then I felt a wave—I guess I don’t know how to describe it other than to say I felt sorry for myself down to the base of my spine. My wife fucking another man. My daughter maybe in some unnamed city instead of coming by to visit and hold my hand and tell me I’d be okay. So I said, ‘I don’t understand any of this, Claire. Any of it. Your mother. You. Why you’ve both abandoned me like this. I have nothing now. Nothing.’ She continued to hold the phone to her mouth. She was walking. Maybe uphill. I could hear her breathing. And then she said, ‘You shouldn’t have kissed me.’ And then she hung up.”