by Alex Miller
Chapter Twenty-One
Sabiha dipped the ladle into the big cooking pot and filled the next bowl with the fragrant lamb ragout. It was the ladle Dom Pakos had dipped into his sfougato all those years ago, the last thing Dom’s hands had touched in this world, a riveted iron ladle that had seen more than fifty years’ service. Sabiha filled the green and blue bowls with the spicy stew, a cloth in her left hand, wiping the splashes of gravy from the rims of the bowls as she set them down on the bench. There was a livid coffee scald on the back of her right hand. The men all arrived for their midday meal within minutes of each other. They had less than an hour to themselves and expected to be served at once. It was always this same mad rush in the kitchen at midday.
John came in from the dining room and picked up three bowls and carried them out. Sabiha straightened and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and she tucked into her headscarf the strands of hair that had come free. Suddenly she realised someone was standing in the doorway to the lane. She swung around.
A drift of pale sunlight fell across Bruno’s bold Roman features. He was holding a box of tomatoes against his chest, his gaze fixed on her, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, the veins of his forearms standing out.
She saw how truly splendid he was. At the intimate touch of his gaze she felt the warmth come into her cheeks. I have become two women, she thought helplessly.
A sheen of exhaustion on his sleek skin, heavy purple shadows under his eyes.
He said, ‘I must speak with you, Sabiha.’
‘I’ll come and see you at the market on Friday.’ She was astonished to hear herself offer him this. ‘You can say what you have to say to me then.’ Her tone was severe. She had said she would see him again!
He didn’t move, but stood looking at her.
‘Put down the tomatoes and go in and have your meal at once!’ she ordered him gently. ‘Do it, Bruno!’
John came in through the bead curtain and stood looking at them. ‘Do what?’ he said.
Bruno bent down and set the box of tomatoes on the floor. He stood up and looked at John levelly.
Sabiha felt a weakness in her stomach and turned to the bench and leaned her weight against the cold marble. She closed her eyes—the blind woman again, retreating into her dark. She prayed Bruno would not betray their secret.
John said, ‘Are you okay, Bruno?’
Bruno said insolently, ‘Yes, I’m fine. How are you? Are you fine too, John?’ He laughed.
John said evenly, ‘Yes, I’m fine too, Bruno. Is everything all right with you?’
Bruno snorted and stepped past John roughly and pushed his way out through the bead curtain.
Sabiha turned from the bench.
John stood looking into the dining room after Bruno, as if he was going to follow him and demand an explanation. He took a deep breath and let it out. ‘What was that all about?’ His colour was heightened with anger.
She picked up Dom’s black ladle. ‘You’d better take these out before they get cold. The men are waiting.’
John didn’t move. When she ignored him he lifted the bead curtain aside and looked out into the dining room once again. ‘I’ll speak to him,’ he said.
‘About what?’ She didn’t like the sound of her voice but she could not control it.
‘If he said something to you, then I should know.’
She met his eyes and saw he had reclaimed his composure. That was so like John. Might he even be prepared to be reassured that there was nothing serious for him to worry about? But he did want to know. He was not dismissing this. He was not going to let it slide past. She saw the firmness in his eyes and in the way he stood. He might be vulnerable, but it was a vulnerability of the spirit and had nothing to do with a lack of resolve. She had lived with John for more than sixteen years, yet she wondered if she really knew him.
‘Please, John,’ she said, her tone softer, pleading a little. ‘You know very well Bruno would never say anything disrespectful.’
‘Why do you keep calling me John?’ He was more puzzled than angry. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was struggling to retrieve herself. She could do it. She would do it. She would cast out the demons and regain the ordered routine of their days somehow.
He went up to her and kissed her on the cheek. ‘It’s okay, darling,’ he said gently. ‘I’m sorry too. I do understand, you know.’
She turned away and looked down at the bench, touching the redness of the scald on her hand.
He waited, but she did not look up and meet his eyes. He stepped across to the other side of the kitchen and reached for a pile of bowls on the shelf above the timber bench. He set the bowls on the bench beside her and stood with his hands resting on the bench, leaning there and looking to his right into the dining room, Sabiha with her back to him now over to his left, filling the bowls with her spicy stew. She might have been a beautiful stranger still, a woman from a world he did not understand, thinking thoughts he could not begin to imagine.
He could see Bruno in three-quarter profile. He knew Bruno to be a decent man. Reliable and cheerful. They were not friends, he and Bruno, but they respected each other and valued the association between them. John thought of Bruno as a contented man.
He had never seen him so agitated as he was today. Bruno was looking down at his hands, which he was clasping and unclasping in his lap, his entire body concentrated on this nervous action. He was not wringing his hands, as an old man might, with anxiety or sorrow, but was flexing the joints of his fingers, one hand gripping the other turn and turn about, as if to ease the stiffness out of them in preparation for some action.
Nejib and his silent companion came through the front door. John watched them. The pair greeted their friends and walked across to their usual table and sat down; Nejib facing Bruno, as was his custom, his friend side on to the Italian. They both looked at Bruno, Nejib’s friend turning in his seat in order to do so, registering that something was amiss. They looked away again, exchanging a glance but not speaking. Bruno appeared to be unaware of them. John did not know the origin of the antagonism between Bruno and these two, but it was already well established by the time Bruno first came to the café, the paths of these men evidently having crossed in some other quarter of life. Bruno never let a Tuesday go by without offering Nejib and his companion a provocation of one kind or another. It was invariably Nejib who fielded these comments, but it was clear to John that the deeper issue lay between Bruno and Nejib’s companion. It was as if Bruno wished to remind the quiet man that he had not forgotten their old issue and was ready to settle it with him at any time he cared to choose. A matter of masculine pride. It was Nejib who kept things at a low temperature between his silent friend and Bruno, and for this John was grateful to him.
John let the curtain fall and picked up three of the filled bowls from the bench. He backed through the curtain and went out into the dining room. He greeted Bruno and set a bowl in front of him. Bruno did not respond to his greeting, but continued looking down at his hands, which were now still. John was turning away when suddenly Bruno was looking up at him; staring directly into his eyes with the look of a man surfaced from a deep dive and struggling to utter a prophecy, his lips parted but no sound coming from them. In his eyes John saw a man drowning in despair and he was shocked.
He waited beside Bruno’s table, knowing the men were watching him. He thought he was about to hear from Bruno news of some terrible diagnosis, untreatable cancer of the pancreas or some other death sentence, delivered to him in the mid-stride of his vigour. But Bruno was not able to speak of his trouble, and instead he looked down and examined his hands again, as if it were his hands that presented him with the terrible features of his dismay; a sly and difficult knot, it might have been, that he struggled with, a knot composed of knuckles and joints, a complicated and intricate thing. John thought of his mother’s Here’s the church, and here’s the steeple, look
inside and see the people. The old nursery rhyme suddenly acquiring for him a sinister meaning.
‘Take it easy, Bruno,’ he said. He moved away and greeted Nejib and his companion and set their meals in front of them.
There was bread and wine on some tables, but on this table there was never a wine jug. John had offered wine to Nejib and his companion when they first came to the café. Nejib politely declined his offer, but John still remembered the tone of the other man’s response. It was cold and contemptuous and filled with pride, as if his claim made him superior to other men. He had smoothed the hairs of his beautiful moustache and said, Alcohol has never passed my lips. It was a claim that set him apart. John had dismissed him as ridiculous, a fanatic. He didn’t like him. The man hardly ever said a word and seemed to come to Chez Dom with Nejib on sufferance, his manner making it plain that he did not consider himself one of these workmen.
One of the men waved to John and asked him to refill their water jug. John took the jug and went behind the bar and refilled the jug under the tap. These men all lived without the softening influence of their families, existing in cheap lodgings, their days precarious, their official standing with the state undecided. They stood on the rim of things, their lives vulnerable and filled with uncertainty, daily reminded by a thousand small things that they did not belong, their presence transient and uncertain. John felt he knew their condition and understood them. He had advised some of them over the years to emigrate to Australia. Two had achieved this, taking their families with them. Whenever a letter came from one of these men they gave it to Sabiha to translate for him.
The front door slammed and he looked up from the sink to see Bruno going past the window, his head down, his hands thrust into his coat pockets. John turned and looked at his table. Bruno’s meal was untouched. The men had all stopped eating. John carried the jug of water over to the table. Someone said something in Arabic and they all laughed and went on eating, the café suddenly filled once again with their talk.
John went into the kitchen and stood in the doorway looking back out at the dining room.
‘Bruno’s in big trouble,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how we can help him.’ He looked at Sabiha. ‘What did he say when he came in?’
Sabiha continued chopping a bunch of coriander intently with minute strokes of the knife, as if she was too engrossed in the familiar task to have registered his question. The rich aroma of the fresh herb filled the kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-Two
She didn’t go to see Bruno at the market on Friday, as she had promised him. She didn’t go to the market at all, in case she ran into him by accident. She couldn’t bear the thought of facing his distress, or being confronted by the confusions of her own fragile emotions. She was tense and wasn’t sleeping well. Tuesday came around and she held her breath, but Bruno didn’t turn up with their order. She couldn’t eat her lunch and pushed the plate away.
John asked her gently if she was all right.
His question irritated her. A spasm of anger shot through her and she closed her eyes.
He looked at her. ‘I asked around at the market.’
She opened her eyes. ‘What for?’
‘Bruno had gone home early. Or was on his rounds. No one could tell me anything.’ John took a drink of wine. ‘It’s a puzzle. But like you said the other day, Bruno’s not the only tomato-seller we know.’ He smiled but she did not respond.
On Sunday afternoon the weather was cold and wet and John went fishing with André. He kissed her on the cheek and went out through the bead curtain. She stood at the curtain watching him cross the dining room. He was wearing a heavy brown rollneck sweater under his blue parka, as if he was trying to look like a real ocean fisherman.
There was a painful creaking in her head. John reached the front door and opened it, and as he did so he turned around and gave her a wave. There was a sudden cracking noise inside her skull and she shouted, ‘There’s something wrong with you, not me!’
John went on out and closed the door behind him.
Had he heard her? Was he pretending he hadn’t heard? She wanted to run after him and force a reaction out of him, to scream in his face, There is something wrong with you, John!
She stood at the curtain looking into the empty dining room, waiting for the trembling to cease. She was glad she’d shouted at him. The truth never hurt anyone. There was something wrong with him. She looked around the silent dining room in despair. She had betrayed John. She couldn’t talk to him. She was on her own. She had isolated herself. She was so tense she wanted to vomit.
In bed that night, she lay awake beside him. He was sitting up reading his book as usual. He seemed to have been reading the same old red book for months. Every minute or so he turned a page. The sound of the page turning seemed to touch a sensitive spot in her brain. She waited, counting the seconds, waiting for him to turn the next page. She could hardly bear it. To break the awfulness of it she said, ‘When I shouted at you this morning, why didn’t you tell me to shut up?’ She turned her head and looked at him. He went on reading, as if he hadn’t heard her.
After a minute he looked up from the book thoughtfully. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d heard you right,’ he said, then smiled. ‘There probably is something wrong with me, darling. You’re probably right.’ He laughed and went back to his book.
She turned over to face the wall.
When he closed his book later and kissed her neck and said a soft goodnight, she could hardly bring herself to reply. What would it take to provoke him? she wondered. Was that what she was trying to do? To provoke a crisis between them, so she would have cause to scream her confession at him in a moment of fury? A light sweat covered her skin and she shivered. If she was not careful she would make a complete disaster of their lives. The trouble was she couldn’t think. She couldn’t think what she should be doing. He was right, she was not herself. She was so anxious it was making her blood pound in her ears. She breathed in and out slowly and tried to relax her body. John was already snoring lightly beside her. How could he be so blind and so stupidly relaxed?
When my story is known to other women they will condemn me, she thought. Except her grandmother and the women of the old days. They would not condemn her. They would take her in among them and defy her accusers and protect her. The Berber women had always been haughty and powerful and feared by their men. To this day they refused to take the veil, but stared down their opposition bare-faced. The spirit of defiance is in my ancestry, Sabiha thought. It’s in my blood. John has no defiance in him. His blood is cool and still. Mine boils.
She was not the first woman to have visited a man to get with child. If her grandmother had been alive she would have told her of many occasions when wives had secretly resorted to this dangerous solution. She wondered then, suddenly, if it was necessary for the woman to experience pleasure with the man if his seed was to take root in her? What would her grandmother have said to this?
John snored contentedly beside her, as if everything was normal and comfortable and settled between them. She reached across him and picked up his book and read the title, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Its covers were stained and warped. He had picked it up at the second-hand book market, which had been set up where once the horses had waited for slaughter. Why did he read such things? Did anyone else read these forgotten books? He never said anything about them. He stirred in his sleep and she looked at him. His loyalty bound him to her, his calm unquestioning loyalty. His love, his quiet decency, the modesty of his self-belief, and of course his unfailing, maddening, infinite patience and goodwill; with her, with his life, even with the wine merchant. She could imagine him as a teacher, gently amused by unruly children, waiting for them to settle and to look at him and to ask him what it was he wanted to teach them. His students would love him. He would respect them. He would be gentle with them. To see him sleeping beside her, her stranger, her husband, made her sad. Terribly sad. She replaced his book carefully on the chai
r and got out of bed and went downstairs.
She opened the back door and stood looking out into the empty lane. Above the roofs the yellow glow of the great mysterious city. In all their years in Vaugirard, they had never really got to know Paris. The Paris she lived in was not the Paris people thought of when they said the word Paris. That beautiful romantic Paris might have been somewhere on the other side of the world for all she knew of it. André's cat was watching for a mouse to cross the cobbles. It observed her disdainfully, resenting her intrusion. The temptation to tell John everything frightened her.
She went inside and closed the door and locked it and stood resting her back against it, her arms folded under her breasts. If she had been religious she would have said a prayer, for them all. Her family had had no religion. Had prided themselves on it. Only the remnant of the old beliefs of her grandmother’s people had survived. Her father had made fun of the old beliefs, but gently, never coarsely, always with a smile, always with an undisclosed respect. She had always been two people, divided between her father’s beliefs and the beliefs of her grandmother. It was her fate to have forced her way against convention in order to reach her child. She looked back over the years and saw that she had never had any other choice. She placed her hands on her belly and whispered, ‘My baby!’ The tears ran down her cheeks. ‘You are no longer alone, my darling.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Two weeks to the day after her seduction of Bruno, Sabiha woke in the night to feel the blood seeping from her. She knew at once it was not a miscarriage but was her period. The shock of it numbed her. Her body had rejected her. She cringed, bleeding into her nightdress and onto the sheet, the seeping issue of her blood and tissue, carrying away the wastes of her failure. She felt mocked. Emptied. Defeated. It had all been for nothing. She had lost.
She wanted to cry out, to curse and to weep wildly, to destroy something fine and beautiful, to purge this bitter sorrow from her life and have done with it. She wanted to be dead. She had invited the savage gods into her life, and now they mocked her. To them she was no more than just another unhappy woman. She was not a warrior, but a victim. She had not killed a lion. What ridiculous arrogance it had been to imagine herself the heroic woman of her grandmother’s song!