Lovesong

by Alex Miller

  She straightened and looked out the window at the street, where Bruno of the perfect score had passed a moment earlier. And she knew, with sudden understanding that made her draw in her breath sharply—so that John looked at her quickly—how fragile and brief the span of a person’s life was. Her father, who had always been there, was soon to be there no more. The forever of her childhood was no longer forever.

  She turned to John. She had spoken to her father in Arabic. ‘It was my father,’ she said. There was anger as well as sorrow in her voice. ‘He’s managed to give himself lung cancer at last.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Is there anything they can do for him?’

  She got up and collected their plates and the cutlery.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’ he asked.

  She stood a moment looking down at John. She wanted to say, Of course I’m not all right! What do you think? All you’re thinking about now is going home to Australia the minute my father dies. I know that. His death will be a relief for you. Well I’m not going to be defeated. I’m not giving up. I will still place my little daughter in my father’s arms before he dies. You’ll see!

  ‘They’ve offered him an operation,’ she said, ‘to remove one of his lungs, and then chemotherapy. But he’s not going to have any treatment. He’s going to leave on his own terms. That’s my father. He’s right.’

  She went out to the kitchen and began washing up the piles of dirty dishes and pots and the cutlery from the men’s midday meal. She would tell her father to wait for her. He was a man of courage. He would find the courage to wait.

  While she worked, Sabiha sang a song. It was a song of a woman’s dream that her grandmother used to sing to them when Sabiha and her sister were children. In the dream the woman goes out alone into the desert one night and kills a lion. The lion has been threatening the children of the village for years and the men have failed to kill it. Today, as she worked at the sink and sang the old song, the meaning of the woman’s dream was clear to Sabiha, and she felt her spirits lift. The time had come for her to take matters into her own hands, just as the woman in her grandmother’s old song had done. She could wait no longer but would go and kill her lion. No one else was ever going to do it for her. If she did nothing, soon it would be too late. Her change would come and all the children would be dead.

  Zahira would soon be alone in their old home, where they had been happy children together, with no one to care for but herself and nothing to do but bear the shame of her spinsterhood with courage. How did one kill such a lion as that? Sabiha did not think it would be possible. For Zahira, the moment of opportunity had passed many years ago. What choice did her sister have now but to submit to her fate with dignity?

  She cried as she stood at the sink, thinking of her father. It gave her strength and reassured her in her faith to realise that her grandmother’s song of the woman’s dream had come back to her when she needed it. She had begun to sing the song without thinking what it was she was singing, the words of the song coming into her head and asking to be sung. How little she and her sister had understood the words of the song when they were children, but had been entranced by the thought of the woman walking alone into the desert under the stars, the old lion watching her approach his lair with an air of bored indifference, his eyes drooping sleepily, never suspecting the woman was coming to kill him. It was a good song. It was a great song. She had always loved it. She was thankful it had belonged to her grandmother and her grandmother’s mother before that, linking her back through the generations to the old days of the women of the tribes, until at some distant point the origin of the song’s poetry was touched with the inspiration of the gods. It was a song that had grown from the soil of her past. A song of her belonging. Now, when she needed it, it had yielded up its strength to her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The following morning Sabiha was at the bench in the kitchen preparing a batch of filo dough. It was another fine day, a shaft of sunlight shining through the open door onto the old tiles of the floor. She could smell the warmth of the day. She was measuring onto the marble two even mounds of the flours she was to mix, when she was suddenly struck by the conviction that there was no real hope of her ever having her child. It came at her like a hawk out of the sun, the certainty that the child was nothing but her own foolish dream. Her heart thumped once as if it would cease to beat forever, then began to race, its stately rhythm abandoned. She clutched the edge of the cold marble bench, her eyes closed, her lips parted, her heart thundering in her chest. ‘God help me!’ she whispered, the world plunging around her.

  John came into the kitchen from the lane. He was carrying a sack of onions over his shoulder. He stopped and looked at Sabiha in alarm. She was hanging onto the edge of the bench, her legs parted, her stomach thrust against the marble, her head thrown back and her eyes closed, her lips parted and her breath coming in short gasps, a low moan or murmured word escaping her at each urgent breath.

  John dropped the sack of onions on the floor and stepped across to her. ‘What’s wrong, darling?’

  She pushed his hands away and stepped back from the bench, bringing her floured fingers to her throat. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right!’ She even managed an odd little cackling laugh. ‘I ate a sesame biscuit and a piece went down the wrong way.’ She cleared her throat theatrically. The seismic tremor in her body was subsiding. It was all right. It was nothing to do with John. It wasn’t going to bring the house down. It was as if she had been slapped hard across the face by her sudden doubt and woken up. Of course she would have her child! Of course she would. ‘I thought I was going to choke for a minute.’

  John stood looking at her. He didn’t believe her. There was a wild kind of innocence in her eyes, as if she had been highly excited by something. ‘What happened? What have you been doing?’

  ‘I haven’t been doing anything. I told you, I ate a biscuit.’ She was defensive, staring at him wide-eyed, daring him to disbelieve her. ‘I ate it too quickly. That’s all. Don’t make a fuss.’ Her fingers kneaded her throat, dusting her dark skin with the white flour. She wanted to laugh. ‘I’m okay.’ She did laugh then, a wild snort of laughter that bordered on something a little hysterical, something a little out of control, emotion blooming in her helplessly. She was smiling. She couldn’t help it. Things are no longer as they were. The thought excited her. Her terrible doubt had not succeeded, but something had given. She was no longer standing still. The years of meek, silent inward desperation, the waiting in an agony of uncertainty for something to happen, it was done with. It occurred to her that perhaps John would be left behind. That perhaps, in a way, she had already left him behind. She watched him go to the sink and fill a glass with water. She felt sorry for him. He handed the glass of water to her and stood and watched while she drank it obediently, as if he were her parent. She held out the empty glass and he took it from her and set it on the bench beside the two mounds of flour. He stood close to her, his gaze going over her, lingering on the swelling of her breasts beneath her white blouse. She put her hand to her breast.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know.’ The laughter refused to be held. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, laughing.

  He would have kissed her on the lips, but she drew away from him. Suddenly he wanted her. He searched her eyes. ‘Let’s go up to bed,’ he said. He reached for her hand. ‘Come on!’

  She pulled away. ‘Don’t be silly!’ She pushed at his chest, flouring his blue shirt. ‘I’ve got to make the filo.’

  ‘Let the filo wait!’ He took her in his arms.

  She struggled free. She was strong, determined. ‘Please!’ She was remembering, with intense remorse and regret, the times they had been unable to wait another minute to have sex and had run upstairs the second Houria was out of the house, laughing with excitement in the middle of the day, making love in the sunlight on their bed. ‘Let me go, John!
I’ve got to make the filo.’ She saw how he was rebuked by her use of his Christian name.

  He stepped away from her, dismayed, angered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. But she wasn’t sorry. She was glad.

  He turned away.

  She watched him carry the heavy cutlery drawer out to the dining room. It pained her to see the puzzlement and hurt in his eyes. She knew him to be the most loyal husband any woman could hope for, and knew also he had sacrificed his career and his dreams to marry her and remain with her in the café all these years. And she loved him and loathed the thought of hurting him. She listened to the clatter of knives and forks from the dining room where he was setting the tables for lunch, and she wondered if she should take off her apron and go out to him and invite him up to bed. She stood a moment, listening, then turned back to the bench and went on with the pastry.

  Into the words of the old songs the sufferings and hopes of women had been gathered over the centuries. Only her grandmother and the silent Berber women in their camps would not doubt her sanity for believing in the existence of her child. She began to sing softly. The songs were her grandmother’s legacy to her. John and their customers might enjoy the melancholy of her singing on Saturday nights, and even be moved to tears on occasion by their own nostalgia, but they would never be the familiars of her songs. She stood at the marble bench kneading the filo dough. She formed it into a ball and stroked the soft silky pastry with her fingers. The shiny ball of pastry might have been the shaved and featureless head of a man, an unfinished man who had yet to be given eyes and a voice. She sang softly as she wrapped the pastry in muslin and placed it on the cold slate shelf in the larder. She asked herself, Is the rhythm of my heart changed forever?

  She stood gazing into the darkness of the larder.

  A firm resolve to act had formed itself, emerging out of the shadows, a boat coming silently into harbour with its strange cargo. It was simple enough. She knew it already; she would wait no longer for her child but would go and fetch the child herself.

  She closed the larder door and turned to the refrigerator and took out the shoulder of lamb. She unwrapped the joint and laid it on the board and stood honing the blade of the short boning knife on the steel, looking down at the blue and purple flesh of the slaughtered lamb, the fine sinews and membranes, the intimacy of its splendid flesh. There would be emotions she had never dreamed of. She could feel her grandmother’s approval. She was sure of it. Her grandmother’s strength was in her resolve. Without her grandmother she would not have been able to make such a decision. She would not have had the courage for it, nor the imagination.

  She set the steel aside on the bench and took a grip with her strong fingers on the rounding of the shoulder. She slipped the narrow blade along the flesh, parting the muscle from the white bone, glistening with the colours of the rainbow and never until this moment touched by the light of day. It astonished her, this hidden work of nature. That bones could be so hard, so set among the yielding flesh of the lamb. Why was this hidden world of bone so terrible and so beautiful? Why did the sight of it fill her today with such unsettling wonder at the strangeness of her own life? She filleted the meat and chopped it into pieces, then put the bone in the stockpot to simmer with the herbs.

  John laid out the knives and forks, four sets to some tables, two to others. The men all had their customary places. He dropped a knife and it clattered to the boards. He swore and stood looking down at the knife. What was the matter with her? He took a deep breath and bent and picked up the knife. He stood weighing the knife in his hand, feeling a sudden violent urge to hurl the heavy thing through the window, to watch the glass shatter into the street and see the passersby shrink back in fear. He breathed on the blade and wiped it on his black apron then set the knife carefully in place on the table.

  He made his way around the small dining room, going from table to table, setting each place for their customers. André went by the window, returning from walking Tolstoy number four—or was it number five? André himself didn’t seem to know. André rapped a greeting on the glass with his ring and waved.

  John had never known Sabiha in such a mood before. ‘John!’ he said with disgust, and felt a little touch of despair. Sabiha would be thirty-eight next June. If she was ever going to have a child it would have to be in the next few years. They didn’t talk about it anymore. She got so upset, it just wasn’t worth it. But perhaps they should talk about it. Perhaps he should insist. She must feel terribly alone with her dread that she was never going to have her little daughter. But how could he bring up the subject now, in this atmosphere? He would have willingly given a year of his life to have been able to take back that stupid remark he’d made at lunch yesterday. But it wasn’t just that. It was everything. It had been building between them for years. It was the time of their lives as well as everything else. The old people getting older and passing on, the sudden feeling of being next in line. Change being forced on them even as they stood still. The old dreams diminished. All that.

  He finished laying the tables and went behind the bar and poured a glass of brandy. He drank the brandy in one swift gulp, closed his eyes, then poured another. He lit a cigarette and took a drag and drank the second brandy. He stood looking at the telephone on the wall beside the bar, the empty glass in his hand, smoke trailing from his parted lips. Her father dying, her change of life coming on like a beast stalking her from inside her own body, and the dreadful strain of not becoming a mother. It might all be getting to be too much for her. He made a vow not to be selfish, to stop thinking about himself and to do his utmost to support her in every possible way. Life without Sabiha would not be worth living.

  He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray on the bar and rinsed the glass at the small sink. He stood drying the glass on a tea towel. Perhaps it was too late to go home. He might have left it too long. This possibility had not occurred to him before. He was a young man of twenty-seven when he first walked through that door. This coming December he would be forty-two, a middle-aged man, a few swift years from fifty. His future was no longer filled with romantic possibilities. He was living in his future. This was it. He had achieved nothing. The world and his peers had moved on without him. He’d kept up none of his old connections. He hadn’t even written to his sister Kathy for years. Except for writing to his mother and father fairly regularly he had neglected his Australian connections. And his mother and father lived in the past. Since they had moved to their retirement unit in Moruya it was all his mother ever talked about: her past, the golden years of her life with his father and the children growing up on the farm.

  John hung the tea towel on the nail and looked at his watch. He should go and see his wine merchant and have it out with the man. He didn’t move, however, but stood with one hand resting on the worn surface of the bar, looking out through the open door at the familiar scene in the street. He would miss this place. Chez Dom and the people on rue des Esclaves. His friends: André, old Arnoul even, Bruno, in a way, Nejib and his soulful oud on Saturday nights accompanying Sabiha’s singing. And one or two of the other men. No great friendships, to be sure. No deep, intimate, sharing, comforting friendships with someone of a like mind to his own. No one who read books. But still, he would miss them. He would miss his place here.

  He had been dreaming for so long of going home he could no longer think clearly about the reality of it. The telephone call from her father yesterday had handed him his dream of a return, but did he really want to return? He stood looking out the door at the street, the smell of Sabiha’s cooking, the sun on Arnoul’s faded bolts of cloth, the Kavi boys in their corner grocery shop. Did he really want to leave this behind and start again in an Australia that he would not know, a place where he would not be known? He didn’t know what he wanted. The windows were grimy, he could see that much. Instead of calling his wine merchant, he would clean the windows. He was at a disadvantage whenever it came to arguing with the French. One great blessing of bein
g at home would be to have access to the vernacular of his own mother tongue once again. How out of touch had he become? he wondered. His own language was a large dimension of his life that was missing here, and would always be missing so long as he lived in France. Sabiha’s English had remained rudimentary despite his efforts to teach her over the years. So where would that leave her in Australia?

  He went out the back and fetched a bucket and cloths and started cleaning the windows. Maybe they would just keep going here, make no dramatic change in their lives, just keep at it till they began to look like André and Simone and old Arnoul Fort, dealing with each day as it came until there was no longer any need to think about making changes. Until there was no more future to worry about.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At five minutes after midday the following Tuesday Bruno Fiorentino came into the kitchen of Chez Dom from the back lane. Against his stomach he was carrying a case of semi-to-coloured Grosse Lisse tomatoes from his hothouse. He stopped just inside the door and set the box of tomatoes on the floor, then straightened, took off his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and stood looking down at his tomatoes. He was proud of them. They were the pick of the crop. Each one perfectly matched with its neighbour. He looked across at Sabiha. She was busy at the stove and had her back to him. When she didn’t turn around he cleared his throat and said, ‘Good morning, Madame Patterner.’ He always used this form of respectful address when he spoke to John’s wife. ‘The stew smells wonderful today.’