by Alex Miller
As she walked through the market Sabiha’s emotions veered this way and that, then stopped dead. Then gusted, exultant, racing into the future. She was certain Bruno had opened the way of the child within her. But she was no longer herself. His tears terrified her; the unforeseen looming at her, suddenly, out of her act, out of his torment, out of the strange place she had entered with him. She had not counted on that. Men were free with their seed and boasted of it. Men betrayed their wives and laughed. Why did this man fall to his knees and weep? She was shaken by Bruno’s grief.
As she walked to the métro Sabiha’s mood was of a strange elation. But for the pressure of the pad between her legs she might have dreamed it. But it was true. She had done it. And she was not the first. As old as woman herself, she repeated. The drift of her child into the infinite dark had been arrested at last. Now the little baby had begun slowly to move towards its mother. Her passion was to be the mother of her child; to bring it life, to succour it, to comfort it, to give it her own life if necessary. And if she were to be condemned for the means by which she had satisfied this passion, then she would stand up and look her judges in the eye and freely admit her guilt. Yes, I did it. I did it for my
child, she would tell them. And who would condemn her for that? A woman with a child growing in her womb is not alone.
Chapter Seventeen
John was sitting up in bed listening to her footsteps as she went down the stairs. He didn’t hear the door close and waited a moment, unsure whether she had gone or not. He called out, but there was no reply. The house was silent now with the silence of emptiness. He stuffed her pillow as well as his own at his back and reached for his book. He took a sip of coffee and opened the book on his lap. He loved the peace and quiet of this hour. After Sabiha had gone to the market on Friday he usually stayed in bed and read. This morning he stared at the open book in his lap and thought of her tormented expression as she blew him the kiss when she was leaving; as if she was departing from his life forever. His throat tightened at the thought of it.
He put on his clothes and opened the curtain and stood at the window. The blossoming clouds were still pink with the dawn. Customers were already coming and going at the Kavi boys’ corner store. Life was going on out there as usual. He picked up his bowl and went downstairs. He set the bowl on the sink in the kitchen and went through into the dining room. He picked up the mail from the floor and opened the street door and looked up and down the street. André was already coming back from walking Tolstoy, the great shaggy beast loping by his side as if it was moving in slow motion, its grey eyes fixed on the bloody deeds of ancestors who had ripped wolves apart on the wintry steppes of Siberia. John waved to André and went back inside and closed the door. He put the mail on the bench in the kitchen and went into the bathroom and took off his shirt. While he shaved there were the voices of the workers arriving at the laundry down the laneway.
He ate breakfast then picked up the mail and went into the sitting room. He put the light on. A stillness in here, the smell of their evenings. The television in the corner on an upended half barrel, a red cloth draped over the barrel like a skirt over the hips of a woman. Houria and Dom’s old green two-seater couch facing the television. A small square wooden table and an upright chair behind the couch. In the corner beside the table his own pile of books, collected from the second-hand book market.
He put the mail on the table beside the pile of unpaid bills and drew out the chair and sat down. He lit a cigarette and looked through the mail. There was a letter from his mother, his name in her familiar handwriting and the Australian stamp. He opened the envelope and drew out the two closely written sheets. There was also a postcard. The postcard was a photograph of the new road bridge at Moruya. He sat looking at the picture, smoking, and remembering the trestles of the old timber bridge, the rumble of his dad’s Ford going over on their way into town. The timber bridge had been washed away in a record flood and the town had been without a bridge for more than two years. He sat smoking and reading his mother’s neat handwriting. There was nothing much wrong with her eyes.
My Dearest Son,
Things are much the same with me and your father. The doctor put him on a bit of oxygen last week, that’s all. But he’s fine. There’s no need to worry. He says to give you his love. Did I tell you? Uncle Martin died. I think I might have told you last time. Martin was eighteen months younger than me. So it makes you think, doesn’t it? There but for the grace of you know who. Martin always asked after you. He expected great things from you. It was a lovely funeral. There must have been two hundred people. I didn’t know he had so many friends. It was a cremation of course. Our boy in Paris, he used to call you. We’ve still had no rain. Aunty Esme told me Chinaman’s Hole is dry for the first time ever. I think of you and Kathy and your mates down there carrying on till all hours of the night. You used to have such a lovely time, the whole gang of you. I used to love it when you were all down there at Chinaman’s in the summer. Which reminds me, I hate to ask, but have you made those plans yet for coming home for a visit? I’m always asking, aren’t I? One of these days you’ll surprise the pair of us. I see you coming through the front door here sometimes and my heart gives me such a kick. Kathy’s talking about getting married! Can you believe it? They came to see us in August. They were on holidays. Touring, he called it. He’s English. They were staying a day here and a day there, stopping at the smart B&Bs that have sprung up everywhere along the coast. I worry how they can all make a living. You wouldn’t know us these days. He’s very nice, but I don’t know if he’s going to be a match for our Kath when she gets going. A bit too nice for his own good if you ask me. Kath needs someone definite. Dad just called out to give you his love. I said I had already. He said, well give it to him again. He’s just the same. He’d love to see you. He really would. And you know I would too darling. It’s a beautiful day. There’s a pair of rosellas comes every morning to the seed I’ve hung in the apricot tree. We’ve only got the one tree here. Think of how many trees we had once! They’ve just come in now.
With all our love, my dearest boy,
Mum.
PS Please give our love to your wife.
John folded the letter and put it back into the envelope.
Swimming at Chinaman’s all summer holidays with his friend Gibbo and Kathy and her mates. He could see the casuarinas on the bank screening them from the house and the beach of smooth river stones. Mucking around down there until the middle of the night. Loretta letting his fingers explore the inside of her thigh in the moonlight, her skin chilled and wet and goose-bumped and exquisitely soft. The softest skin he had ever touched. He could smell Chinaman’s now, the sour leaf rot of the churned water on their skin. He could not imagine Chinaman’s dry. Where had the green water dragons gone and the black eels if the pool was dry? He felt a deep regret that his old home was no longer as it had been when he was a boy and he longed to know it again, to smell the river and the bush and to see his old friends still young, laughing at him for his shyness and calling to him. He wondered what had happened to Gibbo and Loretta and the rest of them. They must all be out there somewhere.
After he’d finished dealing with the bills he went out and started cleaning up the kitchen. He would have the place tidy for her when she got home.
Chapter Eighteen
When Sabiha came into the kitchen from the lane John’s music was on very loud. He stepped across to meet her and kissed her on the cheek. He yelled over Carole King singing, ‘So you’ve been seeing our Bruno!’
She drew back from him, lifting her hand and touching her cheek with her fingers as if he had slapped her.
‘Sorry!’ He raised his hands in mock self-defence. ‘You smell of tomatoes, darling.’
She turned the music off and put her empty shopping bag down by the stove. She took off her overcoat and hung it in the alcove by the stairs. She was trembling. Tolstoy was barking in the lane, as if he’d caught something of her fear and anxie
ty. John was watching her.
She struggled to hold his gaze. She didn’t know what to say and murmured helplessly, ‘Bruno’s not the only person we know who sells tomatoes.’
He couldn’t help smiling at this. ‘Oh, come on, darling! Don’t take me so seriously.’ He tried to keep his tone light and neutral. ‘It was just something to say. Where’s the shopping?’ She seemed so down and grim. ‘Bruno’s still our tomato man, isn’t he?’ He reversed the broom and went on sweeping the kitchen floor, bending to get the head of the broom under the front of the stove. ‘Anyway, I like the smell of tomatoes.’
It wasn’t shame she felt. She had sat in the métro this morning with her head bowed and a sense of doom hanging over her, expecting nothing less than the death penalty for what she contemplated. But no shrieking fireball had shattered the walls and brought the roof down on them. They were not buried, after all, in the smoking ruins of their lives. It all stood in place still, quiet and at peace—now that Carole King was no longer wailing at them. The dailiness of their routine was undisturbed. John sweeping the floor.
She said, ‘I’m going to have a lie-down for a few minutes.’
John straightened and looked at her.
She felt sorry for him. ‘I just need a few minutes to myself.’ She smiled. She had betrayed him. Or what is betrayal? What jury of wives would not condemn her? What she felt, she decided, was guilt and fear. But she did not feel shame. The distinction was important to her. She would plead guilty: Yes, I did it. But there would be no remorse or regret for what she had done. I would do it again. If I need to I shall do it again. She was thinking of him now. She could smell him on her clothes. It wasn’t just the smell of tomatoes, it was the smell of Bruno, his man smell. It was a wonder John hadn’t smelled it. When Bruno’s hands touched her naked thighs the pleasure had been searching, sudden, imperious, driving a shot of electricity into her. At the first touch of his hands a wave of exquisite dizziness had swept through her and she thought she was going to faint. She closed her eyes now and turned away from her husband’s puzzled gaze.
John leaned lightly on the broom as if he were a boatman about to delve for the bottom with his punt pole. She was unreachable.
‘You’d better go and lie down then,’ he said.
When she had come through the door a moment ago there was some fine and heightened preoccupation in her dark eyes. It had claimed his attention at once; the flame of an extraordinary excitement. Something fleeting—the last of her youth, was it? She was more beautiful and more sad than he had ever seen her. But at this moment she was no longer his woman. She was too deep and too alone. He thought of the girl who had lain in his arms on the bank of the Eure that summer day in Chartres, and for an instant the transformation of the years bewildered him.
‘I just need a moment to myself,’ she said again, and turned and went out.
He listened to her footsteps on the stairs, waiting for the creaking of the boards as she crossed the bedroom overhead, imagining her sitting on the side of their bed, her head in her hands. Was there in her sadness, in this change, a sense of their eventual end? To age, and then to die. The futility of it all. It was there in her songs on Saturday nights, the knowledge of death and nostalgia. He had seen men weep for her singing, reminded of their exile and their mortality. He had seen a tear slide down Nejib’s dark cheek more than once as he plucked the sweet strings of his beautiful oud in accompaniment to her melancholy songs.
John was still listening for her footsteps but the boards had not creaked. She must be sitting at the dressing-table looking at herself in the mirror, taking her hair down and looking into her own eyes. His beautiful wife, Sabiha. What strangers they really were to each other. Strangers to each other’s language. To each other’s childhood. Strangers to each other’s tribe. He loved her helplessly.
He went on sweeping the kitchen floor. He gathered the dirt in front of the broom, turning the head of the broom sharp-edged to get the bristles into the wide cracks between the old tiles. He swept the dirt out the back door into the laneway, pushing it to the side over the top of the drain, scrubbing the broom head back and forth until he had forced the last of it through the grille. It was raining, the cobbles black in the cold grey light. He stood at the open door breathing the smell of the rain, remembering the vivid smell of rain when the first drops splashed onto the dry leaf litter of the stringybark forest in summer and the wonderful scents stored there throughout the dry were released into the humid air, rich and heady for the first minutes of rain. He longed to smell that smell again. It was the smell of everything that had once made him hopeful about his life. He and his father dancing around stupidly in the rain, yelling, It’s rain-ing, it’s pour-ing, the old man is snor-ing … His father telling them, It’s raining money. So they all jumped in the car and drove down to Moruya and went shopping and then to the pictures. That rain in summer, it was the smell of happiness.
She lay on her back on the bed, her blue woollen blanket covering her, shaping her, the rain pattering softly against the window. She was calmer now, listening to the familiar sounds of the street, the comforting rain tapping on the window. She was not sorry for what she had done. She was glad she had found the courage to do it. But she was a changed woman. She had become the woman who had walked alone into the desert night under the stars and killed the lion.
She was going to be a mother.
She was going to hold her child in her arms. The little baby would look up at her here on this bed. It would sleep and cry and be joined to her breast. Its little body would be warm and vulnerable, delicate, soft as clouds and yearning for its mother’s touch. She put her hand under the blanket and placed her open palm over the pad and she thought of the potent abundance of Bruno’s astonishing seed. She cupped her mound with her hand and the tears ran down her cheeks. She was exhausted.
She woke from the dream with a start.
The room was cold.
It was a dream of the smooth sweet pleasure of sex. She still felt it. She had woken thinking not of her child but of her regret that if she really were pregnant then she would have no reason to go and see him ever again. She was awed by her response to him. She sat up, waking from the feeling of the dream. Had she destroyed him? Bruno, the loyal father and husband. The image of him kneeling on the floor of his van weeping frightened her. She wanted him to stand up and smile at the great pleasure of what he had done. Not cringe on the floor weeping!
She wrapped the blanket tightly around her shoulders and lay down again. The woman who killed the lion had not feared the living lion, but had feared the lion only after it was dead. It was her defeated victim the woman had feared, when the beast’s nobility had become the carrion of the scavengers, the yellow-eyed hyenas and the ragged vultures that dropped from the sky like evil dreams. It was only then the woman had begun to see that she had brought herself to the notice of these shifty-eyed gods.
How could the modest routine of their lives at Chez Dom survive what she had done? She still felt him inside her. She still heard his moans. What of his wife, Angela, and his eleven children …
She lifted the blanket aside and got off the bed and put on her shoes. She was going to be late with the men’s midday meal. John had turned his music on again. She had never learned to like his music. She would not think of him. Not yet. The time would come for thinking of Bruno and for thinking of John. She would deal with the need for thinking when it was time for her to settle with them both. Now she must prepare the meal or the men would go hungry and then they would go to another café for their midday meal and she and John would go broke. Then what would they do? Without Chez Dom they would have nothing.
She went downstairs into the kitchen and turned off the music. She took her apron from the hook beside the stove and wrapped it around her waist and tied the strings in a bow at her back. She called, ‘Are you there, darling?’
Her kitchen! For the moment she was safe.
She called, ‘Did you get Saturday�
��s meat?’ There was no answer.
She stood at the bench, sharpening the big vegetable knife with the stone.
André's cat came in from the lane and sat inside the open doorway and watched her. She saw its shadow and said coldly, ‘I’ve got nothing for you.’ She turned and looked at the cat. It blinked. Would her grandmother have recognised in this cat one of the old scavenger gods? The masked gods of her old people? Sabiha herself knew only the most faded remnants of her grandmother’s ways. Tones of suggestion so weathered, so neglected, so distant they held only shreds of meaning. Their richness lost even to someone like herself, instructed as a child where she must look for them; in the yellow eye of the hyena at evening, in the black rags of the vulture in the morning. Sabiha had never seen a hyena or a vulture in real life. Waiting was what cats did best. Waiting and watching. Growing invisible in their stillness. Until the moment came for them to pounce. Yes, she decided, and she turned back to the bench and got on with her work, cats are of the family of the old gods.
Twenty minutes later she heard the van coming down the lane. She had not noticed it was missing. John must have gone out while she was asleep upstairs.
He came into the kitchen and heaved two heavy bags of meat onto the bench, then stood back easing his shoulders and rubbing his arms.
‘It’s getting heavier,’ he said. ‘Or I’m getting weaker.’
She was glad to have him home with her. She smiled at him. ‘I was wondering where you’d got to,’ she said. ‘You left your music playing.’
They looked at each other.
He stepped forward and held her against him.
She relaxed into his arms and rested her head on his shoulder and whispered, ‘I love you so very much, my John Patterner.’