by Ghalib Islam
SHOES FOR THE SERVANT
Once upon a time, and this is true, in another country, lived a widow, a mistress of a palatial inheritance, who was old and whose house was dilapidated old, who burned for her youth through brocades and necklaces, long outmoded dresses dragged carpets behind the wearer, and above all, shoes: patent-leather pumps and high-angle heels, pyramidal shoes with long throats exposing much the wearer’s feet, shoes from Continental Europe with sharp toes and thin cones for support, ballet shoes, aerobic dance shoes, tap shoes, long-lace black boots that augured glamour seven decades prior, opera shoes she had gathered before a singing performance during a recent visit to the boot island, singing baby slippers that jingle-jangled with the wearer’s every step, suede shoes, cloth shoes, ankle wraps, monk straps, cross-straps, gladiator sandals, fashionable side-tie shoes, chappals for walking, cavalier shoes with the lace frills of a prior century, formal eveningwear shoes, shoes for cocktail luncheons not to be worn with incorrect saddlebags, bejewelled lachrymal shoes that seemed to weep in the light as they walked, shoes that bicycle pumps injected with cushions of air, cross-country ski boots and their alpine variety, shoes, shoes on the stairs and the landing, spotted on the dining room table and scattered in the drawing room, shoes for long outings, for quiet nights by the gramophone, abundant shoes, choice shoes for every occasion in an echo palace whose mistress hired costume artists and sports stars for in-house pageants featuring her clothes, especially her shoes. She changed shoes by the hour, and after draining a pair of freshness with wear, she handed it down to her servant. One could imagine why the girl might not take such care in the shoes’ upkeep as she did the china and silverware, the rugs, teak coffeetables, and the expensive linen, since she would inherit them in due time. It was the single calculated failure in her job, and important to the story.
After six years of indentured service, roundtheclock rain-or-shine care of the palatial home, shared by the mistress with her several thousand doves, which must daily be fed, whose droppings must be cleared, who live in an aviary and sleep in spacious dovecotes, who exist for neither breeding nor consumption, who are bought at great expense and stationed in luxury until they die of natural causes, the girl commits a life-changing error. It happens on the day the mistress announces that the Archbishop of Bethlehem is coming.
While more often than not distinguished guests fail to keep their promises to come to dinner, there have been surprises: during an August sandstorm, Laurence Olivier had arrived as pledged, eaten a whole meal without speaking once or removing his hat, and with the solemnity of Death himself, had risen and toasted the mistress of the house. Then he had fallen asleep in the front hallway, inebriated and leaning against the coat-rack. One never knew for certain, is the point.
The chef has his hands full, and asks the girl to take care of the custard. She prepares the recipe and lets it cool. The floor shines after her mopping, so not even a small-minded Vatican clerk could discover fault. Though the curtains are washed and the carpets hoovered, the rats caught and roaches exterminated, the house still exudes its characteristic sulphuric odour. But this, she sighs, I cannot change, I have laid traps for the devil and he is smarter than any rat.
She looks to the aviary where the thousand doves await her arrival. Come on, she bangs on her pail and throws their fibrous seeds. Something seems different: most don’t seem to be eating, and curious discomfited, she enters, leaving the latch behind her unloosened. The birds rush about her as if they had been planning this very mutiny, as hundreds peck at her skull and scratch at her body bloody senseless before every one of them escaping through the hatch ajar.
In her convalescent chamber—her bedroom with bandages around her face—she points eyes to the bedside lamp and the teak-wooden chair with its definite shadow, the calcified walls smell of flight near feathers still fluttering, to her pair after pair of hand-me-down shoes. Her bedside mirror has news: claws for her face and bird-implacable red. Her insides have new hungers biting clamouring for another place. She counts again her pair after pair of second-hand shoes leaning against the walls. Shoes, she thinks, for flight: a new beginning.
Her wounds heal, though she will always bear a scar above her right cheekbone. She wanders briefly, pawns the shoes pair by pair, which allows her to pay for board and room in various cities. She buys a crisp, recently owned dress, in which she interviews successfully for a typist’s job at a telegraph company.
She is diligent and warm and charms her employer, gains the jealousy of her gossiping office neighbour, who threads news of his affections to others, and eventually his wife. To fend off his advances to retain her job suppress rumours and retain her stolid guard: these are irreconcilable desires. No other potential employment in sight, and she is reluctant to dip into her shoe savings. What can she do but sink into the hollow of his embrace, nocturnal dust of the shared bed where his arms snap like dead branches and his face turns into a scarecrow’s, his pupilless eyes like coal and incapable of.
Some years pass. They carry on in front of others as if nothing at all, using a nearby flat where they meet regularly. She always feels the need to scrub the floors afterward. Eventually, he befriends a Portuguese woman poet, supposedly a friend of Victoria Ocampo, who suggests, as the three of them gather over tea one afternoon, that he should try the Mexican surrealists of their generation.
He pauses for a moment before proclaiming Mexico a lost nation of the world; Marxism, he says, is the reason Latin America will never produce great literature; it is a handicap, because any ideology or dogma cripples the imagination.
He does not look at the girl when he pours her tea, and she finds the steaming atmosphere intolerable, his arrogance reprehensible, the poetess’s nose so sharp it could cut the thick scent of play between them. She leaves her cup while muttering an excuse or an apology.
She never returns to their flat or to her job. He sends her letters: she is the wife of a notary, her contact is invaluable for expansion of the company, and be reasonable, she is a friend. After several attempts, however, he informs her in a terse communiqué her typist’s position has been replaced. Thereafter, he doesn’t seek her out.
I suppose, she wonders one evening while staring at the everyday commotion outside her window, if this is how love ends: like a frail kitten, a litter-runt that dies on Christmas Eve, mewling and warm and close to the hearth.
On a map she finds in a bric-a-brac store, in a map of the world like none other, she locates a previously unknown country in the map of the world, its name crossed out with a pencil: an unnameable country. Paradise, she thinks, beyond names. I will sell the remaining shoes and cut a ticket.
Paradise has its bureaucratic processes, however, its forms, psychological assessments, job applications. Through an agency, my grandmother manages at long last to find a customer service position at a shoe business, which sends her keys to an apartment in a company building and a membership at a local swimming pool.
The steam vessel of her journey sways across channels and oceans, hugs a continental coastline, rocks in strong winds bleak waves through which my grandmother keeps cool, endures chatter with fellow travellers, their sickness unexpected early births dizziness spells walk invisible through ship’s hull into vast water return to night rest chattering teeth and doctor’s order bedrest and fluids.
From docking ship to lock and key of her new front entrance, her new life’s sole contents of clothes, travel documentation, and meat preserves secure safely in one suitcase through winding streets via taxi.
Baffled by all the cinema stuff on the streets, the cameras and people/ what’s the show, she asked. The driver pointed at the spools of magnetic reel streaming from the staircase landings, at the boys carrying pails of clean drinking water for the staff. When the taxi stopped at an intersection she heard cameramen arguing about film formats and what had the Director said about each of them.
What’s the movie called, my grandmother repeated her question. They’re all called The
Mirror.
Why.
Beats me, he replied, but that’s what they say about every godforsaken show.
Huh.
Longest movie in the world, he grinned.
She turns jammed lock presses whole weight against a door surrenders, gives way to her new home whose bed is a thin mattress, whose walls and ceiling and floor are mirrors, and whose electrical circuitry is crossed with its ventilation system so that turning a switch sometimes releases a gale-force via vents whole weightless apartment and belongings.
My grandmother paced around her house, grew thin and tall in a reflection, squashed and wide in another mirror. The lights in her home fell villainous shadows on her face, made her up to shine on other occasions. She laughed at her image, she gasped, this is me, she wondered aloud.
Cinema is in my home, she shouted. Already, my grandmother was beginning to understand the tenuous demarcation between meatlife and movie world in the unnameable country.
After cooking her first breakfast the next day in the communal kitchen, my grandmother travels to the address of her shoe company job to discover an edifice of trolleys of spilling tape reels, their wiry pushers with eight limbs’ tasks to do at once rushed to reorder magnetic minds scattered on hallways, tumbling from storage shelves, classified for the wrong containers.
She reaches a desk with an employee furiously reciting a data sheet for the day’s entries, figures upon pages pushing volume. Excuse me, my grandmother ventures. A clanging metal container and a pigeon’s flight in the room add weight to her intrusion and the woman at the desk lifts her head. Your name is listed, my grandmother hears, but your job is not to sell shoes.
My grandmother hears descriptions of windy hallways, of the respective tasks of assemblers and collectors, appropriable mental functions of the average suspect mind, and for a moment considers returning to her servant’s task of shoekeeping. But the mere thought of a return ocean journey defeats her surprise and indignation and she signs page after page of contractual agreements that lead finally to her first pair of peering headphones hearing people’s thoughts.
In the Collections Subdivision, she is one of many employees one recognizes by face, but whose name is unknown. Surely there exists a dossier with all the painful details of her life, including descriptions of her voice, her cough, the angle of her neck when she leans forward to work the dial of her shortwave, her eating habits, her casual acquaintances, and, in all likelihood, one could probably locate her name there as well.
Through headphones, my grandmother hears tangles surfs of thoughts break crest in a pillow mind TRAVEL CARD TOMORROW, she hears loud and clear a man’s dreaming plans to apply for the page that will unite two companions in the same unnameable country beyond thirsty light on congested road and car to car, nose to tail of cars in series. Permits for the same country, she learns.
She adjusts her headphones to catch the thoughts of a wandering thirsty caravan following tales of water floating flower petals poured directly from vase to beseeching hands. She learns that they’re in a compound belonging to the heaving giant, twice a man’s height, a people-eater with fart nostrils and all, called Murray who oversees the ungovernable region of the unnameable country. She hears a child Karim’s disbelief as his home fills with dividing fences, megaphones, barking dogs, uniformed officials barking orders and directions from his nursery bedroom to the kitchen for a midnight raid of the pistachio jar. Where in hell’s name have I arrived, she rubs her temples, removes her headphones.
Gradually, she adjusts, accustoms herself to the macabre connotations of her job by comparing its relative ease against the horrors of her previous life of indenture, though she remarks silently at the barking end of each day while gazing up at the sky as the mastiffs sniff her and the building guards rummage through her purse for tapereels that this is the final sky and she has consigned herself to this sky and none other. It fills her bones with dust.
But then this morning is like any other day, she thinks one morning, and orange in colour, she decides for no reason, not all days bear a colour, some are marked by a smell or tintinnabulation or some other sound, and today is orange. But look, she adjusts her headset and twists the dial resolutely: there is that man again.
Early on in his work, Zachariah Ben Jaloun was not supervising so much as questioning his employees on the particulars of tuning in to a mind. He would spend hours after his shift learning to manipulate the dial and discover the internecine transmissions. Eventually, he realized it was as much a trick of listening as it was of finding the right frequency, because an average radio drama could contain hidden minds chattering away. How many important facts he had edited out, he thought suddenly. Collectors were much more astute. They contained assembly as part of their job description. He learned slowly. And in other fields too he faltered.
His verses were finally complete, but since he could not read, he could not proofread them. Not wanting to submit an unedited draft to the publishing house, what he really wanted was for the professor to have a look at the lines, but the thought of the academic’s pointed finger on a cipher and the question, here, Zachariah, what do you mean, drove a blade against that idea.
But lest we dig again into deep tenebrous soil, and since we have been waiting long enough, let us no longer delay the inevitable meeting of Zachariah Ben Jaloun and Grey Eyes, the revelation of her name especially, now that you realize the author was only designing another hoop-and-fire game for you to play, to jump through for his entertainment.
A cinematic forecast flight of a string orchestra: words are spoken in rain or fine weather: can you love an illiterate man, an illiterate writer.
Her unexpectedly husky laugh as the girl asks, what do you mean. I mean simply that I have, in the course of the last several months, lost the ability to read.
That is a moment of surely high consequence if it ever occurs. And another, held within the cabbage-folds of a single cello prelude, though no, that one must be retained from even the slightest description. Order and logic prevail, sadly, and we must continue to exercise patience. If in fact these are the real developments between Zachariah Ben Jaloun and Grey Eyes there must be causal agents. Proximity is the first, of course; as you are aware, the two now work in the same subdivision of the same department. Yet it still takes three shrews of fate twenty-two long weeks to orchestrate a possible meeting.
The girl takes her usual spot under the large clock near one of the exits, its hands frozen supplicant together on six-thirty. She unpacks her cooked meal and that man again, sitting only two tables away, she notices. A shiver. Though on no occasion, she thinks, do his movements appear calculated. It may be that he simply happens to be in her vicinity, repetitions of sociality do occur, and friendships do arise among employees. On the other hand, supervisory staff never fraternize with collectors, and the nature of this job, and of this whole country, in fact, inspires fear in her. Not for the first time does she regret discovering that strange map, of closing her eyes and letting her fingers stop wherever they will. If he has taken interest in her then she is being surveilled even more closely than others. Why, fear gives way to anger, and she passes the stranger a glare while tightening her jaws.
At that moment, Zachariah Ben Jaloun happens to look up from his meal and notices her for the first time in weeks. He seals up his roundmetal container and departs at the earliest opportunity. He suffers for the rest of the day from a debilitating stomach wound, and wonders if a mere glance can do all that. He hopes he will never have to speak to or to look again at that unkind face.
Eight days later, on her way out, the girl notices the same man sitting in a cubicle near the exit, turning the dial and listening carefully to a shortwave, as if unaware of the time of day. He doesn’t seem interested in anything but his work, she realizes, and probably, like most male employees in Collections, is a lonely bachelor with a mother who lives two cities away whose death would not inspire in him the slightest feeling. She has read books about such men, and s
he is sure the Ministry of Radio and Communications produces scores of them. She does not think of him again.
Ben Janoun, the deputy chief of the subdivision looks down at his shivering frame from a great height. Papers flutter. Since their last meeting the deputy chief has grown a great deal taller and fatter. He takes up half the room now, or perhaps it is only that Zachariah has shrunk. A low wind picks up and moves papers off the desk and around the room.
Zachariah, he speaks very slowly, breathing gasping deeply between words. You know I am no longer your direct head of staff, he blows all the papers pens notebooks and rattles the typewriter keys. Nevertheless, the deputy chief informs, he takes an interest in those who have been demoted-promoted to Collections, and is happy to announce that the subdivision is satisfied with Zachariah’s progress thus far, and has chosen that he should undertake a deep survey of the collectors, and then to assemble an oral presentation on their strategies of locating mental frequencies for the purposes of increasing departmental efficiency.
This message takes over an hour to transfer, during which time the room becomes soiled with the deputy chief’s perspiration and spittle, though the expenditure of all that energy returns him to a somewhat regular size. The positive nature of the message reassures Zachariah, the wind dies, and by the time he departs, the deputy chief is almost the height of a regular man, though not exactly. Out in the hallway, a loose tile gives way and Zachariah’s left foot slips painfully all the way to the thigh. He struggles to restore it to the surface. Wincing, hopping on one foot, he wonders what the hell. Then through the opening he catches sight and dizzies him, of not the floor below but an infinite well.