by Alex Miller
She laid both hands flat on her stomach and closed her eyes. She would wait until Friday, then for another few days, a week more maybe, before going to the doctor to have it confirmed. But she knew already this was not a false sign.
She whispered, ‘I am a mother.’ What could go wrong now? She would go home and see her father at once. He had not died in the night. She would sit beside her father’s bed and place his hands on her stomach. Those strong hands of his that held her when she was a little girl, her father’s quiet courage making the world safe. They had been each other’s champions. How fiercely she had loved him when she was a little girl. How greatly she had admired him. Had understood him so perfectly it was at times as if she was him. Her dear father. She had never believed so confidently in the continuation of the old people as she did at this moment. When she thought of her father dying, she was certain the voices of the ancestors persisted. Out there somewhere. In the mysterious uncanny silence. Why should it not be so? The voice of her grandmother had woken her from her sleep. She had not imagined that call.
She would go with her child in her womb and see her father and for a brief time the three of them would be together in the old home. She would set her father free to take his leave of this world. Wasn’t it the same heartbeat in her child that beat in her own breast? Sabiha could see her father’s smile as he placed his hands on her belly and closed his eyes, the new life under his hands. Now that her child was coming, she was sure that her father’s death was not to be the end of him.
She slept. And when she woke again she began to ask herself the impossible questions, questions for which she had no answers, but for which she would soon be required to provide answers. John must be the first to know. And was she to tell Bruno he was to be the father of her child? She saw Bruno now as a strangely unstable and even rather infantile man. She had ceased to see him as the man of the perfect score. It had been John’s taunt that day that had begun this whole thing; Did you know Bruno’s got eleven kids? How could she not have flung it back in his face? Her patience with him reached an end that day and she felt she had to go and find her own answer. There was a great blast of energy in her head and in her chest that day. She could still feel it. She had known from that moment that she must either take matters into her own hands or remain without her child for the rest of her days. Well, she had done it. Her child was safe in her womb. So why was she afraid?
She turned her head on the pillow and looked at John. Would she tell him everything, from the beginning? How was she going to navigate the contradictions of her life now? The dangers that were ahead of her, she began to see as she lay there in the dark, were far greater than any that were behind her. The child, like the death of the lion, was a beginning, it was not an end. The thing was not done yet.
Looking at John it seemed to her that men are forever alone. Men, she said to herself, are not like women. Their aloneness is in their souls. In their deepest place, men remain solitary all their lives. No matter how well loved they know themselves to be by a woman, men are always on their own. We never touch them in the place of their solitariness. John is alone now, lying here beside me sleeping. And when he reads his books, then he is also alone. He looks in those old dead books for the answer to his own aloneness, seeking a confirmation of his solitariness in the thoughts of other men, hoping to hear in their thoughts an echo of his own deepest aloneness. And when he meets it, he says to himself with satisfaction, There! I knew it already. And when he drinks too much wine he embraces his aloneness as if it were a punishment that he has deserved. And when he goes out on the Seine at night with André in his boat and they fish together and share their friendship, then they are alone in their hearts and they know it and it afflicts them, and they can’t be honest with each other. And their dishonesty twists their thoughts around each other and around their friendship and makes them dissatisfied, and they withdraw into themselves and into their solitariness for the grain of solace that is there for them. Solitariness is a man’s only truth. And that is the difference between us and them.
But the woman who has a child growing inside her body is not alone. The man has no companion for his soul. He is always looking for something he can’t have. He is always discontent. But the woman who is a mother has a companion for her soul. Woman is not singular, she thought. Man is singular and always remains so. It is an illusion for Bruno that he has become a new man, but for me it is a reality that I have become a new woman. The truth will destroy Bruno’s illusion and leave him alone and sorrowing. But the truth of my motherhood will confirm the change in me.
She felt sorry for John and for Bruno and for poor silly old André, and for all men—even her father. It is not just Bruno; they are like children, she thought. Men never meet the perfect friend they dream of meeting. The hero they long for. They dive deep into themselves, hoping to find a companionable meaning, and they find only themselves.
She drifted among these thoughts until she at last fell asleep again. In her dream the sun shone on a field of ripening wheat in the Medjerda Valley and she was a girl. It began as a happy dream. The figure of her grandmother, dressed in black, walking ahead of her through the golden wheat. Sabiha was hurrying to catch up with her grandmother in order to show her a beautiful flower she had found among the stalks of wheat. As the dream went on a little, Sabiha began to realise that no matter how fast she went, and no matter how slowly her grandmother seemed to be going—and her grandmother was going along very slowly—she was never going to catch up with her grandmother. Her frustration at not having sufficient strength of will to overcome the forces holding her back became so strong in the end that Sabiha woke, suddenly, with a feeling of alarm.
She lay there wide awake seeing her dream and feeling as if something terrible was about to happen to her.
She realised John was not beside her.
Then she heard him coming up the stairs and smelled the freshly brewed coffee. Her heart was thumping in her chest. With a shock, she remembered she was pregnant. How could she have forgotten? Even for a second? She sat up. Yet she had forgotten. For far more than a second. She wanted to feel her breasts to reassure herself she had not dreamed her pregnancy, but at that moment John came into the bedroom and put on the light. He was carrying the tray with their coffee and biscuits.
He said, ‘Good morning, darling. How did you sleep?’ He set the tray on the chair beside the bed and reached for her dressing-gown and draped it around her shoulders. ‘It’s freezing outside. Wet and freezing.’
She must have been staring at him with a peculiar expression on her face. He laughed and said, ‘What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
She burst into tears, spilling coffee over the blanket.
John jumped up and took the bowl from her, then put his arms around her and held her against him. He rocked her gently backwards and forwards. ‘There, there, darling. It’s all right.’ The lovely smell of her hair. He smiled. She was like a child who had woken from a bad dream. ‘I love you so much, my darling,’ he whispered into her hair.
She couldn’t stop crying. When she did finally pull herself together she blew her nose and wiped her eyes. He was sitting there smiling at her and looking pleased with himself. She decided to tell him everything.
As she went to speak, the words forming already in her head, she met a powerful resistance. It was the same force that had prevented her from catching up with her grandmother in the dream. It was as if she finally stood at the lip of a precipice and could not make herself jump. A deep unbidden urge of self-preservation, it was, preventing her from telling John the astonishing fact that she was carrying Bruno’s child. It was just too enormous to put into words. She couldn’t do it.
John said, ‘You have to go and see your father at once. You mustn’t leave it any longer. If your father were to die before you had a chance to say goodbye to him properly …’ He shrugged. ‘Well, you know you’d never forgive yourself.’ He put his hand on hers and leaned and kissed her
on the forehead. ‘You’re exhausted worrying about it all. I can see that. Get Sonja to come over and do the cooking for a week. She’s got those two big lumps of girls of hers to look after the spice stall. She can’t sing, but she can cook. The two of us will hold this place together till you get back. You mustn’t worry about it anymore.’
He put his arms around her and held her close against him. ‘I’ll do the Friday morning run from now on. I should have offered ages ago. I’m a mean bastard, lying in bed here reading these useless books of mine every Friday as if they’re some kind of necessity, while you go traipsing off in the rain to drag yourself around that rotten market week after week. From now on I’m doing it, and I don’t want to hear any arguments from you.’ He sat back and looked at her. He reached over and wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘Okay then? All better now?’
She thanked him.
He got up off the bed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing. I feel ashamed of myself for not offering before.’ He leaned forward and looked into her eyes and lowered his voice. ‘You’re a strong woman. I know you’ll get through this and come out the other side smiling.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The following afternoon, after the customers had returned to their places of work and the cleaning up was finished, Sabiha went into the sitting room under the stairs and lay down on the couch and covered herself with a blanket. John was on his own at the table by the window in the dining room. He was reading. He turned a page, lifting his cigarette to his lips and narrowing his eyes against the smoke, the murmur of activity from the street, the grey rain falling steadily in the November light. When André walked past the window, his pipe in his mouth, his umbrella held aloft, Tolstoy on the lead, he looked in the window and saluted John with a dip of his head.
The telephone rang and Sabiha woke with a start and threw the blanket aside and got off the couch. She steadied herself with a hand to the arm of the couch, dizziness washing through her, then stumbled out into the dining room. John had already taken the call. He held out the receiver to her.
‘It’s Zahira,’ he said and went back to the table by the window and picked up his book, which he had set face down on the table when the telephone rang. He held the book open in front of him but did not resume reading. He watched Sabiha. She was speaking Arabic and he could not understand what she was saying. A change always came over her whenever she switched from French to her mother tongue. It was not only the larger range of tones, but a change in the way she carried herself. The sound of the Tunisian dialect was familiar to him. He thought of it as a kind of music. He loved the sound, its strange familiarity. He had once made a half-hearted attempt to learn it. But Sabiha had proved to be an impatient teacher and he was not a good student. That had been during the first year of their life together, when Houria was still alive. The Arabic lessons had usually ended in hilarity. He smiled now, thinking of those days.
Sabiha was half turned away from him, leaning down a little and speaking into the telephone, as if she was straining to see something. While she listened, her head moved slightly, registering the message. Then she spoke again, her voice calm and unhurried.
He had forgotten how to say I love you in Arabic. It was the first phrase she had taught him. He was lying on top of her on the bed in their old room under the slope of the roof, looking into her eyes and repeating the words over and over, she softly correcting his pronunciation. ‘You’ll never get it,’ she told him, her voice breathless with his weight on her chest. ‘You make the sounds but you don’t make the meaning. You speak Arabic as if it is Australian.’ They laughed and made love. She already knew how to say I love you in English. She said it beautifully. Her whispered accents when she spoke English always delighted him.
She hung up the telephone and filled a glass with water at the sink behind the bar then came over and sat opposite him at the table. She drank from the glass and looked at him over its rim, her throat moving
with each swallow. When she had drunk all the water in the glass she set it on the table in front of her and said, ‘Zahira said my father is waiting for me to come home.’ She met his eyes. ‘So he can die. He’s impatient. He’s ready.’
John placed his hand over hers. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’
‘Do you know what he said to Zahira? He said, Everything will be all right when Sabiha gets here.’ Her throat tightened on the words as she thought of her father saying this to her sister: Everything will be all right when Sabiha gets here! She had been away so long. There was something broken in her connection to home that would never be repaired now. It was not only the death of her father. It was the conviction that the last link with her childhood was about to disappear. Had perhaps disappeared already, even years ago, and she had only just noticed. She thought of the news she was to give her father. The beginning of the new life in her womb, news she did not have the courage to tell her husband. How she had longed for years to have this news for her father, and now it was to be filled with sadness. Her dream had become the dream of something long ago.
John got up and walked around the table and stood behind her. He rested a hand on her shoulder and with the other he gently massaged the tight muscle below her neck. She felt his touch deep in her chest and she closed her eyes and did not resist.
Chapter Thirty
In the morning John brought Sabiha a bowl of coffee and a sweet biscuit. He sat on the side of the bed and sipped the hot milky coffee. The bedroom was cold and it was too early for conversation. They might have been brother and sister, hugging their steaming bowls and gazing vacantly before them. She knew it would happen soon now. She could feel it building behind the stillness. She was waiting for it. The end of this.
John got up off the bed and collected their empty bowls and brushed the biscuit crumbs from the front of his shirt. ‘You’ll only be gone for a week,’ he said. ‘You’ll be back before we know it.’ He had booked her a return flight to Tunis for Monday. Not sure how long she would need to stay, he had left the return date open.
After he had gone to the market she got out of bed and dressed and went downstairs into the kitchen and began the routine of her day, preparing the sweet pastries for the weekend. André's cat pressed its cold fur against her leg. She moved her leg aside and it gave a little cry. She straightened and poured the smen into the pan and turned the gas on low.
Her period was due today. There was no sign of it. Her breasts were still sensitive and firm, aroused by the secret tensions in her body. She had goose bumps on her arms. She turned and dropped a piece of broken biscuit on the floor for the cat and whispered, ‘Minette! I am pregnant!’ There, her secret was out! She had told it.
The cat sniffed the biscuit, nudged it disdainfully with its nose, then looked up at her and miaowed unhappily. She felt the cat’s dislike of her. A scavenging god! She tipped the almonds and smen into the food processor. Her grandmother would have made it all clear to her. When your little child is in your arms, everything will be forgiven you.
Thinking of her grandmother made Sabiha feel calmer.
How could anyone ever see a little child as a mistake? A mother and child! Or as evidence of an evil act? It was true. Her grandmother would not have panicked, but would have waited patiently, until the answer came to her, as she knew it would. It is written, my dearest child. Just as the Berber women never roused their camels to hurry when they crossed the highway to Tunis, but crossed as if the highway was not there, following an older road, a road visible only to those who shared their memories. A sacred road that would always be there, no matter what new things people put in its way. She took two large handfuls of dates and put them in the processor with the almonds, then added dried figs. She poured in the orange flower water and switched on the processor and stood watching as the mixture formed a thick paste.
That evening she and John were watching television. She was sitting on the green couch and he was sitting in the big brown armchair. It was a cold night and they had lit the g
as fire. It was a film about the war. She was not really following it. The smell of fresh pastries still lingered in the air. When she went across to the grocery store before the midday meal to get some milk, a woman in the queue had stared at her. When she met the woman’s eyes the woman had smiled and looked down at her. How could the woman have known? Sabiha had felt naked to the strange woman’s gaze and had been forced to look down out of modesty. Would other mothers know as soon as they saw her that she was one of them? Were there signs she did not know?
John made a sound and she looked across at him. The air was stuffy with the gas fire. He was sunk in the deep old chair. His eyes were closed and his chin had dropped to his chest. She saw how he was going to look when he was an old man. Perhaps he was already an old man. She ached with a sudden tenderness for him; to be close to him again as they had once been, as if they were part of each other, one and the same person. She got up and switched off the television and sat down again.
John opened his eyes and heaved himself upright against the back of the chair.
‘I was dreaming,’ he said. ‘Did I say something?’
‘You made a little sound.’
‘We were out in the bush together. It was rolling country. Open country.’ He frowned at the gas fire, recovering his dream. ‘The sun was shining and there were little white puffs of cloud.’ He looked at her. ‘You were with me in Australia. Nowhere particular. Just home with me. It was a race. We had to jump over these red and white striped hurdles, like the horse jumps at the Braidwood show when I was a kid. It was easy. We looked at each other and smiled with confidence as we floated over the jumps.’ He put his hands on the arms of the chair and, with an effort, stood up. ‘God, that chair swallows you.’