Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  I threaded in another reel and turned the flipper and we heard the kids’ young voices. We listened to the boys playing around with the recorder, taping themselves burping and squeezing their armpits and laughing, and then we heard Ma showing them how to rub the tops of glasses to make them vibrate. The boys liked the fun of recording and erasing. They did it a lot.

  We listened to Ma’s young voice telling them the story of the old woman who swallowed a fly and the little-boy voices joined her chanting, Oh me, oh my! She swallowed a fly. Poor old woman, I think she’ll die! I played that tape to them a lot when I needed to get Bea to sleep. The night Ma made that recording I was nursing Bea and half listening to them, and worrying about where I was going to get the rent money. I was deciding I had to get back to work, to raise them on my own, the way Ma raised me. I needed to erase more, play, erase, record, erase. Let things go. Move things forward. Make a living. Let him go.

  Sean laughed at the boys and said, Jenny, you were a good storyteller.

  Her eyes shifted toward those old, old sounds. Opiates don’t affect hearing as much as sight. I knew she could hear those tape recordings from a time when we both felt we could do anything.

  A recording is a kind of grieving for something already gone. I like live music better. I like not knowing what’s going to happen. Sean put on Ma’s Sinatra record and squeezed in on the bed near her and he lay on his side and slipped his arms around her and she could tolerate his touch. I went to call Bea. I needed to hear her voice. I needed the living room.

  I got a dog today, she said.

  New York’s no place for a dog. What does it do while you’re gone all day?

  She said, I thought of that. I got a jacket for him so he passes as a guide dog and he can come with me. I tell everyone I’m training him. Reverend Moody saw us on the street and told me I was good to do service.

  I liked her cheekiness but I said, I go away and what do you do?

  Things changed between Bea and me when I was going back and forth to Hamilton. She got independent. That night she said, I miss you, Ma.

  Bea, I have no choice.

  She said, I know. You know what happened today? I was trying to get this boy to ask me out on a date. My friend went up to him when he was eating a pizza and told him he should go talk to me. He finally came up to me and I asked him, Do you know why I wanted to talk to you? You know what he said? Because you want some pizza?

  We both laughed and I said, Sounds like Dexter, and she asked, Why don’t boys think the same way girls do?

  Oldest question in the world, Bea.

  Isn’t it lonely there with Gran?

  It’s okay. She’s got other people around too.

  I meant for you. Ma, why didn’t you ever get married again?

  I’m still married to your daddy, Bea.

  You know what I mean.

  I only ever loved him.

  But so you wouldn’t be alone.

  Bea, it never worked that way for me.

  Ma, how is it there?

  It’s life, Baby Bea. She loves you. We’re taking her to the hospital tomorrow. Wanna talk to her if she’s awake?

  No, it’s all right. Ma, remember tempus fugue-it, baby, fiddly doo diddly dee?

  Of course I do. It’s late. Sweet dreams.

  Ma’s eyes seemed caught behind a screen. She slept and woke and searched for us. I asked Sean where his wife thought he was.

  He said, We’ve lived together but separate for a long time. She got used to it. We’ve had the same housekeeper for years. She stayed after the kids left. She loves my wife better than I did. Katherine, I’ve made a lot of mistakes but the mistake I did not make was to stop loving your mother. It took us a long time to admit it.

  He was beside her, stroking her cheek, and she roused and was unusually aware that night. She said, I want to see the stars.

  I looked at Sean and he nodded. We got her socks and slippers and a big robe and we pulled her up to sitting and wrapped it around her. She was bones now, awkward to move. We supported her up the stairs, one step at a time, pausing, resting, next. At the top we shuffled against each other in the small vestibule and finally we were outside in the night. She turned her small face upward toward the stars and said, Fresh air.

  We got her far enough into the yard away from the street lights to see the brightest constellations, the tipped W of Cassiopeia, and down below the glow of the steel mills over the bay. She said, Well, bye, moon, bye, stars.

  Going back she tried to hold herself up, and to get her down the stairs Sean and I made a swing of our forearms for her to sit. She had pain as we lifted her back to bed and Sean was behind her, holding her, and her head rested back on his shoulder. I brought them a tray with tea and ice cubes and Sean organized her blankets and she held his hand. I said, I’m going over to Nan’s. See you lovebirds in the morning.

  I wanted them to have their last night in the apartment alone, and even though Ma was so sick, neither of them objected.

  MAHSA

  It began with a knock. Our house was always empty in the mornings. I opened the door and a man filled the frame. I knew his smell and I knew his eyes. I knew everything about him. It felt shocking to see him there, as if he were in flames, burning but not turning to ash, eyes bright, alive.

  (So this is love, the pulsing in the head, the blood pitching, so this is love. Pain too and singing and music, so this is love, this trembling, you are in my head all the time, and now this aching, and these sweetly devotions, and you have come to me again, so this is love, the pulsing in my head, so this is love.)

  Hello, Mahsa.

  Kamal?

  He lifted a hand toward me but I stepped back, then he did too.

  What are you doing here?

  (Twenty years? His eyes the same.)

  I live here.

  Here?

  Could I come in?

  How did you find me?

  The music director at McGill.

  You saw Jean?

  Can we talk?

  Kamal crossed the threshold and came into the place where I lived with Ali and Asif and Lailuma and his body felt strange inside these walls. He was looking with great curiosity, especially at me. He sat on the couch and I on a chair across from him and I offered him tea and rose to make it and he said, Mahsa, wait. Don’t go.

  I’m only going to the kitchen, I said.

  Then we both laughed, and I sat down again. We began to slowly tell each other our stories like dutiful obituaries, whos and wheres and whats without the great swamp of why. He had been part of the Bengal war, a cataclysmic labour, three million dead, ten million escaping to India, a half-million women raped.

  He said, I joined the air force and saw it from above like a corrupt god.

  You never wrote about it.

  After the war, he said, I went to Islamabad and worked in the civil service. I married and worked in Afghanistan in education for a while. After I divorced, I moved to Australia. What about you? What have you been doing for the last twenty years?

  He asked this lightly, with a lift of his shoulders, in a way that made me laugh. We might have been any two old friends catching up on news. I was wearing jeans and bare feet and a camisole-style shirt with thin straps and my arms were bare. It was a humid August but I never put on air conditioning until Ali got home because I liked heat. I kept our blinds louvred downward, the light comfortably shadowed inside. It was too late to run to the bedroom to fetch a blouse and I felt almost naked sitting across from him with nothing on my shoulders and my hair down. Kamal sat, legs apart, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. He was still wiry and strong. His eyes, so familiar, looked at the rugs from Pakistan I had hung on the walls and my beautiful ceramic lamps and the photographs of the children and Ali, and a French-Canadian painting of snow. Though it was morning, in the warmth and darkness, I felt as if we were hiding, though I was doing nothing wrong at all, talking with an old friend from Karachi. I could not take my eyes from him. The corner
s of his lips deepened when he smiled. His hair was still thick but cropped shorter. He wore ordinary khaki pants and a plain, inexpensive short-sleeved shirt. He said, Mahsa, you are still very beautiful.

  I turned from him and then he told me the age of his twin sons which was the same age as Asif and both of us were silently calculating what had happened and when. We must have married at about the same time, but we were not yet ready to speak of this.

  He said, My sons are not good Pakistani boys. They have lived too much abroad, and are lazy and like surfing and rock music.

  He was pretending to be rueful, but I could hear his disguised love for them, and I was much charmed by how openly he expressed his affections, as if they were in the room and he were teasing them. His warmth soaked me like a monsoon.

  He said, My wife left me for someone else when the boys were thirteen. He shrugged and I noticed how youthful his skin was and how smoothly and energetically he moved and he said, It was ill fated. We did not belong together. When she left, I decided to make a fresh start away from the gathering violence. I took the boys to Australia because I was offered good work there and they could study in a Western style but mostly they like to surf. They go to their mother during the holidays, she moved to Lahore. They are at Sydney University and they are in a band called Bebop Raga and they need me only for money.

  I had forgotten how it feels when a man wants to win the attention of a woman. I knew his sons’ Australian-Indian pop rock band.

  I said, My daughter, Lailuma, likes their music.

  Oh, Kamal said, pleased, you have heard of them, even that oxymoronic song, “Broken Energy Kundalini,” with didgeridoo and tabla and rubab.

  Our conversation stopped. To speak of our children was to speak of our love for them and to feel suddenly melancholy. Even this we set aside in our curiosity about each other. We wanted to touch, and we did not know now what to do.

  Kamal gestured to the piano. Would you play for me?

  Always he had understood how to soothe me. It felt natural to walk across the room and to play for him. I wondered what to play and thought of “As Time Goes By” and decided not and I played him one of Katherine’s pieces, complex and difficult. The sound in the room felt different. There was no resistance but a listening silence and I let myself be absorbed by the music and I played full and thick, and wound down to the last notes almost inaudible in their delicacy.

  Mahsa, you play well, he said.

  Then I asked again if he wanted tea and he said yes and in this way I could go into the kitchen and he could look around the living room and he called to me, Where was this picture taken? and You must be able to see the cross from this window at night? and Do you get back to Karachi ever? We talked through a doorway, stopping and starting like ordinary people talking, and the feelings did not subside. I was looking for something so I could say to myself, Oh, well, I was better off. But his energy was no longer devouring and I knew that I was not better off. We presented ourselves as if we had chosen the paths of our lives. I came to the doorway and leaned on it, waiting for the tea to steep, and he asked me about Ali’s business and how I spent my days and I felt ashamed so I said, Well, I used to perform in New York, but I wanted to be home for the children. It has worked very well. I teach a little. I have lots of time to practise. What about you?

  Absolutely, he said. I can hear that when you play. I don’t want to bore you with what I do. It is still education. I did get some schools going in Pakistan. It works well enough.

  How long are you staying in Montreal?

  I live here.

  Then we fell silent.

  I said, I have a student coming soon, though I did not and I had not yet brought him the tea. He stood and said, We should see each other again.

  And then I understood the way in which he was changed. The young man I had grown up with had suffered and was ripe and self-assured. He was not the kind of man who would say, I am lonely, but I felt that too in him. We did not stray into the darkling territory of our shared past and how I did not resist being sent away, and how I stopped writing to him, and how we loved each other. It was impossible to speak of all this now.

  I thought, We have never stopped seeing each other.

  And though he left and I closed the door behind him, his presence was now burned into the air of my home.

  From the window above the street, I watched him leave and the clouds were sharply outlined against the sky and the Montreal streets were alive with faqirs and Zelin’s and donkey carts. Down below, Kamal Jamal turned back to look up at me in the window and he raised his hand when he saw me watching and I raised my hand to him. His opal eyes were so beautiful. The senses do not lie. The body does not lie.

  KATHERINE

  Ma opened her eyes and I sang her a bit of “All of Me.” She preferred the Sinatra version, not Billie’s. She said, I like a man’s voice singing those words.

  I’m the only man in the room, I said, till Sean gets here, and he can’t sing.

  She said in her raspy, drugged voice, You’re killing me.

  He shakes my ashes,

  greases my griddle,

  churns my butter,

  strokes my fiddle.

  My man, such a handy man!

  She said, That was my mother’s song. How do you know that?

  I know all your songs.

  I lay my hand over her cool fingers until she dozed. She woke and drifted off. Watching her die reminded me of my years with the babies when I counted time in moments not days or nights. I got her ice chips, moistened her lips, lifted her up on her pillow. I had to get some part-time work. The year had depleted me. I was broke.

  Sean came in. Want to go out? Your family is here.

  What?

  They’re at the apartment.

  I pictured T walking down into that little basement, ducking through the low doorway. I wondered if the kids were taking him around the neighbourhood, if they’d introduced him to Nan. For the first time in all the months of waiting I cried. Why the hell hadn’t he told me he was coming? Helping not helping. Doing it his way. But I was happy they were there. Damn him.

  They came to the hospital and waited with me in the hall, in the hospice kitchen, with other people waiting for people to die, and we talked mostly as if no one was dying because what else do you do?

  T said, I’m taking Jimmie on tour with my new band.

  Just when I’m not there, you blow into town and think you can take over.

  Jimmie wants to come, babe. He’s good. You wanted me to help out.

  I said, My mother’s dying. Now all the hard work’s done with Jimmie and he’s a good young man, you’re taking him on the road. T, you keep him straight.

  He laughed but said a little quieter, Katie, I’m clean now. He’s lucky to play with this band. Don’t you worry, babe, I’ll take care of him. He’s half mine too, you know.

  That’s what I’m afraid of.

  But I heard that thing in his voice and I let him wrap his arms around me and it felt good, it always felt good, and he was trying to take care of us, too late, but I let my body tell me what to do and it was letting him hold me and it was soaking in his heat and resting after months of sitting and grieving and trying to keep things going for the kids and wondering what I was going to do. All those years of keeping everyone close, and now I had to let everyone go. I couldn’t take care of them all anymore. They didn’t want me to.

  I went to the funeral home and made arrangements. I had to borrow money from Sean to pay for everything and he said, I want to do this, don’t worry. By the next day Ma was in and out of consciousness and there was a terrifying force in her dying grip. She took my hand and held on so hard and her fingers were digging into the bones on the back of my hand, hurting me. It was a horrible clutching as if she were hanging from a cliff and I did not tell her it hurt and could not bear to try to ease my hand out of hers. T was outside the door, where I could see him, and Sean stroked her forehead and dabbed her lips wi
th a little sponge of cool water. She was in and out of sleep and she opened her eyes and when I leaned in close to hear her raspy whisper she said, Ming, there are flying things fluttering over my forehead. Get them away, Ming, please.

  MAHSA

  When can I see you?

  Let’s talk on the telephone. It is difficult for me to get out.

  (I could lose Lailuma.)

  Kamal said, After the war, I wanted to live. And teach. So much was lost. Half the country cannot read. Imagine not being able to read.

  I watched the slant of the light through my window. As he described his sons as babies, I imagined the courageous woman who gives birth to twins but he said nothing about his wife. I watched the winter-afternoon light thin on the bare branches tapping on the glass.

  The seasons changed again. Kamal’s voice said on the telephone, I used to work with a man who lost his eyes in the war.

  I listened and watched the sharp, bright summer light, and I lowered the blinds against the heat.

  On a late-fall afternoon he said, I married in Islamabad and my father arranged it.

  The street lights were making little haloes over dead, dried leaves on the sidewalk.

  I told him about Katherine. He told me about his work and raising his boys so far from home, and one twilight as the room darkened he said, I never stopped thinking about you.

  I learned how he grew into a man. He failed to move his ideas forward as our cities filled with shootings and bombs. I asked if his wife had any choice when he took his sons to Australia.

  He said, She was with someone else. The boys spent all their holidays with her. But he did not answer what I asked.

  Do you remember the last time we were together in Karachi? I asked. You said to me, We will never find this again.

  He said, I do not remember saying that to you. I was smarter than I thought.

  I laughed. My mother used to say in Pashto, Ask the fox, Who is your witness? And he will say, My tail.

  The strangeness of Kamal and I when we were young was that we never said goodbye and we never made a plan for the future. Now, we understood everything about each other. There were things we could not talk about and there was neither impatience nor urgency because we were no longer young. Montreal was not supposed to be my life but a short season. Nothing was forgotten and nothing perfectly remembered either.