by Alex Miller
Chapter Fiveteen
As usual on Friday at a little after five in the morning, being careful not to disturb John, Sabiha slipped out of their bed and pulled her dressing-gown on over her nightdress. It was still dark, the only light a yellow glow around the edges of the curtains from the streetlight on the corner outside the grocery store. She steadied herself with a hand to the bedhead while she felt around with her toes for her slippers. She walked over to the door and went downstairs and out the back to the toilet. Sitting on the toilet, she rested her elbows on her knees and put her chin in her hands and stared at the back of the door. She had counted the days, had calculated her move. This Friday was her fourteenth day. There was no need for her to vary her customary routine.
She had left the toilet door half-open and could see a thin edge of the laneway. It was silent and deserted at this time of the morning. She shivered in the chill. She had dreamed her baby cried out for her, the heartbreaking wailing of her child drifting in her mind like an old sickness. The dream had woken her and she had whispered, ‘Don’t weep, little one. You will soon be in your mother’s arms.’
She made the coffee as if the routine of her life was securely in place, and their world was not falling into the sun. She warmed her hands over the gas flame, then heated the milk in the little copper pan that Houria had kept for this purpose, and maybe Dom too before Houria. When the coffee was ready she sat with her elbows on the kitchen table, cupping the warm bowl in both her hands and gazing at the stove, not seeing the stove but seeing some thought that had no shape, only the dread of it. The unmediated moment itself. Soon it would be upon her.
She drank a little of the coffee then set the bowl on the table and broke a piece from one of yesterday’s sesame biscuits and dipped it in the coffee and ate it. She thought of her father sitting in his wooden armchair with the blue cushions at his back. He was waiting for the moment when his favourite daughter would come home and place her child in his arms. Then death could carry him off peacefully. And when he was dead her uncles would come and bury him. Her father had no religion, but the uncles would insist on a religious burial. Her father had always been different from the rest of his family. She remembered with pride how he had stood up to the soldiers when their neighbour’s house was ransacked in a search for weapons. He had stood in the midst of the soldiers that day and ignored their curses and their guns. He had challenged death that day and not flinched. Surely he was that same man now? She was confident he would challenge the cancer in the same way he had challenged the authority of the soldiers; would calmly ask the cancer to wait until he held his grandchild in his arms.
She carried a bowl of coffee and two sesame biscuits upstairs. In the bedroom she switched on the bedside light and moved John’s book aside and set the coffee and the biscuits on the chair beside the bed. John raised himself on his elbow and thanked her. He watched her getting dressed.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her gently. ‘Did you sleep okay?’
She slipped the dress over her head and stood with her head bent doing up the buttons. She did not look at him.
‘I hope you’re going to wear your overcoat,’ he said. ‘That dress isn’t going to keep you warm.’ He watched her. He searched for something to say to her that would lighten the mood between them. ‘Last week you forgot the saffron,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Remember?’ It wasn’t a very convincing laugh.
‘It’s on my list,’ she said softly, struggling with the last button. The world had split in two as it hurtled on its way into the cauldron of the sun. Nothing like it had ever been imagined.
John said, ‘Darling, why are you crying? Please tell me. Come over here and tell me.’
She looked at him. ‘I’m not crying,’ she said, and smiled. ‘Is there anything special you want this week?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Whatever I’ve done or not done, darling, I’m sorry.’ He sat up and held out his arms to her. ‘Come on!’
She came over and leaned down and touched her lips to his.
He would have held her but she straightened.
She stood looking at him. ‘I was just thinking of my father.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘I’d better go.’ It seemed to her in that moment that the two of them must be the loneliest people in the world. Why? she asked herself in despair. Why are we so alone? What have we done to deserve it?
John reached for the bowl of coffee and drank from it. He made a slurping sound when he drank. He set the bowl on the chair again and wiped his lips with the back of his hand then dipped a sesame biscuit into the coffee and bit into it.
She looked at him. Biscuit crumbs clung to his lips, a sesame seed glinting like a baby’s tooth on his unshaved chin. She might have leaned and tenderly brushed away the crumbs and the seed with her fingers and kissed him. She buttoned her overcoat and stood at the end of the bed.
A dread of something terrible touched him; the way she stood there looking at him, her face a mask weirdly uplit by the bedside lamp, her eyes so still, so sad, so determined. As if she was not here with him but was in some other place. At the door she turned and lifted her hand to her lips and kissed her fingers and blew the kiss to him. Then she was gone.
Chapter Sixteen
It was still dark when Sabiha left the café by the back door. She closed the door behind her but she did not lock it. She stood a moment in the dark looking along the lane, her back to the door, the air cold and smelling of the night. The city was only just waking. André's cat sat on the roof of the van watching her, a gleam of light reflecting in its eyes. She walked to the end of the lane and turned right into rue des Esclaves towards the métro. A street-cleaning machine was crawling along the gutter spraying water, its brooms swishing around, gathering up last night’s rubbish.
She waited on the platform. There were few other people waiting with her. She did not look at them and they did not look at her. She would remember later, though imperfectly, the inward-curving advertisement on the wall of the tunnel opposite her proclaiming in gold cursive lettering overlaying a grand old building the words Stolichnaya Vodka. These two foreign words would recur to her again and again in an emphatic voice, the key to a tormenting riddle. The train pulled in and she got on and sat by the door, her bag on her knees, her hands folded over her bag. She closed her eyes and bent her head.
The train speeding her through the blackness of the tunnels, pursuing a howling fugitive from the underworld. In the screeching of the rails along the curve she heard the screams of the hunted woman. Then, suddenly, by a kind of miracle that is not to be understood, the speed of the train and her solitariness calmed her. Soon enough the sun would rise and the night would be over. A moment of happiness swept through her like a cool reviving breeze on a stifling summer evening at home—that moment when her father looked up from reading in his chair by the back door and smiled with pleasure to see her there. She could not say why she was happy in that moment.
The train came to a halt and she stood up. When the doors opened she stepped out onto the platform. The escalators were crowded now with people riding down to meet the trains. She rose through the spent night to the day. I am Sabiha, she said, rising towards the surface. This is who I am. This is the name my mother and my father blessed me with when I was born. I love my name, and I cherish the memory of my mother and father.
She walked down the aisle towards the back of the market as always, the men watching her as she walked by. She went into the women’s toilet. In the booth she removed her underpants and put them in the left-hand pocket of her overcoat, then she took a pad from her bag and put it in the right-hand coat pocket. She reassured herself that she was preparing to undergo a clinical procedure. There must be no suggestion of disgust or guilt or shame in this. This was no more than a resumption, she told herself, of the endless procedures she and John had been required to submit to during the early years of their marriage. Nothing more than that. A means to the same end. Some of those procedures had been humiliating. So
me had been enough to chill the soul forever. The only difference today was that this particular procedure had not been officially sanctioned. She had filled in no form, had signed no indemnity against the unforeseen. This was not part of the elaborately efficient world of the French medical bureaucracy. She was here to fulfil a practical purpose. She would be detached, therefore, and unemotional. She would undergo the procedure. Would submit to its necessities without complaint just as she had in the hospitals.
She gloved her forefinger and thumb with toilet paper and gripped the seat by its edge and lifted it. She held up her skirt and crouched above the bowl and emptied her bladder. The back of the cubicle door was painted a dark glossy green. It reminded her of waiting for her mother with her sister in the hospital in Tunis when she was fourteen, staring at the shiny green door through which they had been told her mother was to return to them with a new baby brother or sister. Only there had been no new brother or sister. Her father’s patient explanation had not convinced her. She and her sister looking at her mother in the bed as if their mother had been placed under some strange enchantment and was no longer herself. Her mother’s sad smile from the remote place to which she had gone with her dead child. The cubicle door was just the green of that old hospital door. She would not let the memory overwhelm her. She would not be cowed by such signs as these.
When she had finished, she stood and buttoned her overcoat and stepped out of the toilet block into the noise and blaze of the powerful overhead lights, the acres of boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables illuminated brighter than daylight, the yellow and blue forklifts, like enormous plumed insects snorting and foraging among the diminutive men and the gorgeous produce, selecting this and that and carrying it off. She realised she was clutching her bag to her chest. She breathed slowly and let the bag hang loosely from her hand, and she lifted her free hand and brushed her hair back from her face with her fingers and stood straighter, stepping out with her accustomed poise, her head held high, looking neither right nor left, walking as if she walked in a place where she could not be seen—in the desert at night under the stars, where solitariness is a gift to the grieving soul, journeying towards the dreaming lion in his lair. She was afraid, but now she knew she was going to go through with it.
As she walked between the aisles of produce, Sabiha scarcely heard the cries of the men or saw the spectacle of it that morning. She was remembering, with sorrow and shame, the days when, at her insistence, John had been repeatedly required to give specimens of his semen to be tested. It had been as if they tested him for the quality of his manhood, as if he himself were being brought into question. She had witnessed the humiliation of it in his eyes, in the apology of his gentle smile. They had not talked about it. It was she who had seen that these tests and questions had begun to define them and to defile them, and she had brought the dreadful inquiry to an end. ‘We will do no more of these tests,’ she said one day. They had scarcely talked about it since.
They had not been eligible for the more advanced therapies, the new technologies of human reproduction. There was nothing wrong with them. They had no condition, and the doctors did not deal in matters of the human soul. It was suggested they consult a psychologist. John would have done so but she declined. They would abase themselves no further. Their love had survived changed. Something thereafter remained incomplete. The silence between them announced it every day. Then John had suddenly taunted her with the number of Bruno’s children, and something in her had given way. The waiting had come to an end. Perhaps it was for the best.
As she approached Bruno’s stall, Sabiha’s skin felt chilled and she was trembling. She reminded herself that she had always been nervous whenever she had had to submit to a physical examination and had never overcome those feverish bouts of nerves that had made her shiver when she took off her clothes for them, her skin breaking out in goose bumps as she stood in the cubicle and waited. She had always had to steel herself to go through with it. To smile at the nurse and the doctor while inside she cringed and protested.
As she drew closer to the stall she repeated to herself, It is just a clinical procedure. Trusting the lie to provide her with a modest private model of universal morality; a key to something good and true, to stand between her and her despair; a charm with which to enchant the forces of her disbelief. But the words that spun in her head, contradicting her meek insistence, were Stolichnaya Vodka. Something in her was not convinced. Something protested. Something in her resisted and cried out against this. Something old in her, it was. An archaic belief that refused and stood its ground and would not yield to her semantic play. A belief more ancient and more durable than clinical procedures. She recognised in this resistance the sentiment of her grandmother’s songs; the wisdom of the old women. It was this that refused to submit to her dissembling. An echo of her fabled Berber ancestors roused to voice its protest. Tell the truth, her grandmother had always said. Speak it, whatever it is. Do what you must do but do not lie about what it is that you do. Do not call it something else. Call it what it is.
There it was, displayed to her openly by the simplicity of her grandmother’s truth: the realisation that she was not the first woman to have ventured this solution to her childlessness. She stopped abruptly and stood still, clutching her bag to her chest once again, knowing suddenly that this thing she proposed was as old as motherhood itself. As old as woman. She was not alone. Her grandmother was with her.
She saw Bruno then. He was unloading his van, the broad back of his red and blue striped shirt. She might have been watching him through the wrong end of a spyglass, or seeing him at the end of a tunnel, the fruit stalls and their people to either side of him blurred and out of focus. He was so real, so physically there, she held her breath. He swung around from the open doors at the rear of his van, three boxes of tomatoes embraced against his chest, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, his jeans faded almost to white at the knees, his long black hair loose and glossy. In front of him the elaborate display of his beloved varieties, Costoluto Genovese, Caspian Pink, Dorothea de Brandis. They might have been delicate varieties of roses, or ladies of the theatre whom it was his delight to serve.
Her stomach lurched and a fine sweat came to her skin as she stood waiting for him to see her.
How beautiful he was. She was surprised. She had not seen his beauty until this moment. His muscled arms and shoulders. His calm. The ease and grace of his movements. The perfect manliness of his world. The threat of his beauty touched her, and if she had witnessed his death this minute she would have felt not regret but relief. How could she do this? She knew now there was no going back. She was already in that other place. The old reality had no meaning.
He saw her then and stopped, standing so still he might have been a figure of stone, his black hair fallen across his face, his lips parted.
Without taking his eyes from her, Bruno slowly bent his knees and set the boxes of tomatoes on the concrete, then he straightened and stood with his hands hanging by his sides. He might have been a man who had detected the stealthy approach of his enemy and was stilled by fear, nerving himself to the contest ahead of him.
It was Sabiha who moved.
She walked along the last few yards of the aisle and went up to him. She stood so close to him she smelled the familiar tang of tomatoes on him. She offered him no greeting, but looked into his eyes and waited for him to understand her purpose there this morning. She saw that something in his gaze was stricken by what she offered him, and she understood that he was mastered by his lust for her. Without a word he turned and walked around his display to the back of his van and she knew herself invited to follow him. At the rear of the van, where the doors stood wide open, he stopped and held out his hand to her. She took his hand, as if it was an act of common chivalry from him, and he helped her up into the back of the van. The touch of his fingers sent a shock through her and she drew in her breath, a small sound of distress escaping from her throat.
Inside the tall
van she set her bag down and rested her back against the side wall and closed her eyes. She could not steady her breathing. The van dipped and rose as Bruno climbed in. She heard him closing the doors. Blackness pressed on her eyelids. She felt him move around her now. He was close, his smell strong, his breathing hard, his fingers finding the buttons of her overcoat, opening her coat then reaching and lifting the skirt of her dress. His hands on her bare thighs, a low moan from him as his fingers found her nakedness. Then he was easing himself into her, gasping, gripping her buttocks and pressing her to him. She opened her thighs and lifted one leg onto a stack of tomato boxes, crouching and taking him deep. He groaned, his body shivering, his voice a scattering of broken syllables, pleading or sorrowing, ‘Aah! Aah!', and might have been taking a knife in his flesh.
The exquisite pleasure was unexpected. It shocked her. She fought against it and cried out. She thought she would go to her knees with it and she gripped his arms and cried out to him, ‘Bruno! For God’s sake, Bruno!’
His wordless howl as he came inside her was of a man struck to the soul.
And those cries of ecstasy were her own.
The sheetmetal side of the van buckled at her back and boomed.
They stood astonished, their bodies locked together.
She gasped and drew away from him. Retrieving her underpants from her overcoat pocket she put in the pad and stepped into them. She smoothed her dress and buttoned her overcoat and felt in the darkness for her bag. Her body was trembling. Her head pounding. She was reaching for the door handle when she was stilled by a strange sound. Bruno was sobbing in the darkness. A chill went through her. He was crouched at her feet weeping.
She found the handle and opened the doors and stepped down from the van. She walked along the aisle towards the front of the market, the doors of Bruno’s van swinging and screeching behind her. She closed her mind to him. Wasn’t he a man? Why did he kneel and weep? She would not be able to make her careful purchase of spices from her friend Sonja. She just couldn’t do it. She had to go home at once.