Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

Ammi-jaan, I do not know where she is.

  The crease deepened between her eyebrows and her gaze penetrated me with the purpose of having what she wanted. By force or by wheedling. Always I was to be a servant in a doorway.

  She said, It is his last wish. I will tell Asif if you will do nothing. You cannot stand in the way.

  But I could.

  I cooked, chopping soundlessly, arranging the pans so that there was no clatter when I took them from the cupboards, and on that visit I cleaned every window. If I pressed lightly enough not to squeak it was a quiet task. I could better keep peace with Ammi-jaan if I worked. I meditated on the molecules of light outside passing through the perfectly cleaned glass. I rose hours before the old people who were suffering with their own grief because no son should die before his parent. At dawn if Ali was sleeping I sat under the window and watched the dust motes in the air. I imagined myself spinning with them as I prepared myself for the day. Though his needs were different now, I knew what made him comfortable and what he desired of me. In his dying, he commanded the world with less authority, but still he tried. I wanted for him his dignity and he sometimes thanked me which, after all his years of indifference, felt cloying. One day he said, You don’t fight this. It happens to you. And I nodded because I knew that it was true.

  Then began the eyes’ cloistered look. I brought him, one morning, photos of our early years together, when the children were young, when he was a handsome and vibrant man born in Karachi, educated in London, starting his family in Montreal, when I was still hopeful and trying to please. We were at our best in the first year raising Asif together. I sat on the bed beside him to share them but he only glanced and pushed them aside. I had hoped for a word from him for me. But he could not bring himself to give me this. He said, What time is it? Asif is coming. You need to go do the shopping.

  I returned early that day because he had been so weak and when I stepped inside the door, a woman was in the hallway putting on her coat to leave. She flushed when she saw me, said in a British accent, Asif let me in. I’m an old business associate. Pleased to meet you.

  I shrugged. It did not matter anymore. Part of me wanted to ask her to share a cup of tea, but it was curiosity, not real interest, and so I let that go too. Difficult to nurse the dying, but good to do it well. Mor used to say, Give even an onion graciously.

  Lailuma came home. When she saw him, emaciated and so sick, she stepped backwards, then stopped herself and approached him with her arms open. He was stiff and patted her back and she said, Abbu, I am so sorry. He answered, You are promised.

  She tried not to be alone with him, and in their chaotic sorrow she and Asif put aside our family’s turmoil to try to show their love. Watching the three of them I saw—finally without shame—the closed throat of our family’s lies. Soon I would be a widow and free, not with youth’s heedlessness but with a battered liberty. The children came and went from Ali’s room, their faces still with apprehension, and Lailuma has never told me what she did or did not promise her father. Neither has Asif. It was their first dying. They could not know that they would not feel better when it was finally over. I massaged his cold feet. Once, when we were alone, he looked at me and said, I think I have done well.

  Yes, Ali, you have done well.

  I wanted to dissolve any last hardness between us. But this is something that cannot be willed. There are veils between man and God, between man and himself, seven heavens, seven gates to hell. Ali and I could not find a way to say to each other, Things that do not belong to us ordained our lives. The last time he was able to speak coherent words I said to him, We tried, and he shrugged and answered, It was a life.

  When Ali died, at three thirty-seven in the morning, Asif disappeared to their office downtown. He came home after sunrise, said that he had telephoned the family and business associates abroad, including Ali’s oldest friend in Pakistan, the family to whom Ali had promised Lailuma. Asif called Lailuma into his bedroom, and when they came out again, her face was clear as it had not been since she was thirteen. Whatever the obligation around the marriage was, Asif had managed to free Lailuma. Money must have passed hands. I do not know. Money solves many problems and it is a bitter and shallow way to solve them. Better to use the eyes and soft speech. But not always possible.

  According to tradition, a woman is not to mourn for the dead for more than three days, except for a husband, for whom the mourning is four months and ten days. A widow is to wear simple dress, no kohl or perfume, except a little qust or izfaar when she cleans herself after her period. But I am finished with tradition. My children are grown. I stand naked and unperfumed. Let the lions come. I release myself.

  Asif washed and wrapped Ali’s body in the kafan for burial. I bathed his familiar skin, now wasted and cold, and I smoothed the crease between his eyebrows one last time for his passage to paradise. They carried him to the Islamic cemetery in Laval.

  My son went into one door of the mosque, Lailuma and I into another. We heard the Salat al-Janazah, prayers for the dead.

  O God, forgive him and have mercy on him,

  keep him safe and sound and forgive him,

  honour his rest and ease his entrance;

  wash him with water and snow and hail,

  and cleanse him of sin as a white garment is cleansed of dirt.

  O God, give him a home better than his home

  and a family better than his family.

  I prayed with the women the final taslim, Assalamu Alaikum Warahmatullah, Peace and blessings of God be unto you. By my own will I could not extinguish my fury, not in another day or a thousand. No woman is allowed by the graveside when men are there, and so, from a car, Lailuma and I watched Asif and the other men guide Ali’s body into the earth, and when the men were gone, Lailuma and I were permitted to be by the closed grave.

  That night, we were finally alone. Lailuma and Asif sat together talking and looking at photos of their father, and I wondered what memories they would settle on. Children sometimes blame the parent who lives on. I left them, a widow now. I walked through the darkness down to the river. I pulled my niqab out of my pocket, dark cloth that Ali had never seen. I tied it into a tight bundle around a stone. I stood on the bank and tossed it far away and watched it disappear under the black fast-running waters that flowed with neither joy nor remorse toward the sea.

  KATHERINE

  I have a full album of material written for two pianos that I will record with Mahsa. We have moved on since “New Thing.” I have to do the gig at the Women in Jazz Festival in Ohio and the tour to Brazil. Mahsa sent word that Ali died when I was in the Black Forest heading over to Berlin, and I wrote her a card. I had to say something so I wrote, Dear heart, you are in mine.

  Nature does not care for music or children or lovers or the length of anyone’s time. Nature relentlessly pursues life. When I got home I phoned Montreal on the way to Ohio and I told Mahsa my agent was booking our tour, to get practising.

  She said, Come back soon. I am ready.

  MAHSA

  The first time I saw Kamal after, I did not want to make love. I wanted to sit and cry and he sat near but not touching. We had not seen each other for a long time. He put the kettle on to boil and I said, I feel like walking into the river and floating out to the ocean.

  He answered, I’ll come with you.

  I was not used to a man wanting to be with me in this way. I had forgotten his warmth. I answered, Well, not yet. Let’s do a few things first. I still want to play.

  And I let him put his arms around me. We always did this first.

  MAHSA

  She’s gone, T said on the telephone. No warning. Nothing.

  T said, People like Katie don’t die. (My arms, though stretched out, remained empty.)

  T said, She was just back from Brazil and we were sitting around with the kids. She was on my knee and I was rocking on the chair which always annoyed her because I broke a few like that. Bea was squeezed in on Dexter’s chair complai
ning about someone not taking her seriously and Jimmie said to her, You got the creds to say whatever you want. You don’ need anyone’s go-ahead.

  Katie leaned into me and half whispered, See what we did, and Jimmie asked, What’d you do? and everyone was laughing and having a good time. She liked it when we were all together. I didn’t do it enough for her. No one thought there was anything special about her going to bed. She was jet-lagged. She called me from the bedroom and I didn’t pay much attention because I was enjoying myself, but the second time she called I went.

  It was an aneurysm.

  The road’s hard, T said. She was always running around. I know she thought she was making up for lost time. She never wanted to be still except when she played, and that was not stillness, that was just being in one place. I heard that thing in her voice and I knew what she wanted so I went to her because I always went to her when I heard that. We always went to each other when we heard it.

  Then, silence.

  I wanted so much to hear Katherine’s voice. I imagined narrow basement stairs to underground rooms in the little clapboard house on Mountain Brow and the smell of stale smoke and her mother putting to bed a little girl whose father was in China saying sometimes in the winter and sometimes in the fall and I thought of Katherine watching her own baby daughter break a dozen eggs so she could listen to Coltrane and I remember inviting her up to play with me at the Surf Maid when we were both new in New York, the night we became friends, and the years of playing over the phone to each other. I was so free when I first met her, before I got married, travelling back and forth on the bus.

  What about our tour? How selfish the living are. I imagined T coming into the bedroom that last night, her tall man, walking through the doorway, not so pretty anymore, and how she must have looked at his eyes, were they tender or desiring, or was she feeling already any weakness, any pain, and did he embrace her that last night? Other people’s loves are mysteries, what they accept and what they do not. T and Katherine were supposed to have plenty of time. She must have watched him close the door shut and pull his T-shirt over his head, and climb in beside her. I imagined them falling asleep wrapped in each other’s arms that last night on earth. Sleep is most perfect beside the beloved. Who can explain the miracle of love that lasts a lifetime?

  Lailuma came from the West Coast carrying a small backpack. Asif flew down and stood with Dexter and Jimmie. The memorial was at the Promenade Theatre. Jazz artists played and students read tributes and I saw lots of young people who had been at the BAM. Bea danced. T played, the sound she loved best in the world, except her own playing, or, maybe, playing with me.

  Bea spoke from the podium they covered with baby’s breath and black tulips, everything dramatic like Katherine. They had three of her biggest hats hanging from a hall tree and a picture of her on an easel and of course they played her music. Bea said, The most important thing in my mother’s life was her piano. We moved here in a red convertible from Hamilton so she could play. When she wasn’t playing and teaching she loved walking in New York and she loved reading. You could walk with her for hours. When I was a little girl, she played for my ballet lessons and after we’d hurry home because my brothers were waiting. She took me to my first ballet in Hamilton and we got in standing room but someone who knew her gave her a couple of seats right up front. I think she was always a bit lucky but when I said that she’d always say, The harder you work, the luckier you are.

  Dexter said, She had complete self-confidence. We came here with nothing but we never knew that. We’d walk through the markets and she found bruised tomatoes that people threw away and she held them up and said, Look at that, nothing wrong with it. I’m going to make you a ratatatatatouille tonight. She could survive on nothing, and she did, for music. I do not know when she slept. When we first came here, she’d more or less put us to bed then go downstairs to play and she was up in the morning to get us to school. She was so happy about her first solo recording. She put us on the cover.

  Jimmie said, I’m not much good at words. She was too young, that’s what I keep thinking. And she had terrible taste in clothes.

  Everyone laughed thinking of her second-hand cocktail dresses. Jimmie said, What can I say? Ma stuck by me. I look out at all of you and I see people she played with and people she taught and I think she stuck by most of us in this room, one way or another. Now her friend Mahsa Weaver’s going to play.

  All my favourite pieces with Katherine were for two pianos and it was too difficult to choose something to play alone so I made a new arrangement of “Two to Love.” I could not play both our parts but I did what I could.

  The reception in the lobby overflowed into the aisles of the theatre and T came to me through the crowd. I said to him, She is the best friend I ever had.

  T held me with god-abandoned grief and after a long time he released me and said, Her body was cold when I woke up and I put my finger on her blue lips, and there was nothing. I tried to shake her out of it, how could my best girl die like that beside me?

  Lailuma and Bea and I walked in Central Park. Bea told us what she knew of Katherine’s Chinese father, and how they had finally talked about her grandmother’s arrest when Katherine was writing “New Thing.”

  What do you know about it, Mahsa?

  I knew grief’s dark maw. I said to her, When we first met, we were two young women who loved jazz. We talked about music and we always talked about our children. Katherine liked best to look forward, not back.

  Lai sat with us on the bench in Central Park, her skin clear, her hair loose, red-coloured fingernails and red boots. The day was cool, damp. Clouds covered the sun and the air turned chill. Bea said, I’m going to meet my brothers now. Come over later.

  We watched her run lightly across the park, graceful even in her raw and ferocious and untouchable mourning. Lailuma asked, How could they have done that to Katherine’s mother?

  There is a moment when you understand your children are not yours anymore and it feels right and melancholy. I could not yet bear to tell Lailuma more. I could not yet bear to tell her about her Afghan great-uncles, of losing my beloved Abbu and Mor. Aunt used to talk about the fury of the dead. Finally I cried and Lailuma put her hand on my arm and said simply, Mor.

  My baby daughter had become a strong woman who could comfort another. I wanted to tell Katherine.

  I made my first solo recording, Live at Nuage Bleu, and I dedicated it to Katherine. Kamal joked, Not me? Lailuma and Asif asked, Not us? I wanted to include a piece that Katherine had been writing called “Violet.” When she played bits of it on the phone I had found it obscure and haunting. But she never sent the score and Bea said she could not find it in her papers. Maybe it stayed in Katherine’s head.

  Bea and Jimmie and Dexter came to my launch party and we celebrated. I included the recording of Katherine and me playing “Two to Love,” and I recorded a poem by Hafsa for Jean.

  After the party as we undressed for bed I said to Kamal, What my heart desired did not happen.

  He completed the second part of the proverb, What Allah wanted was done.

  He asked, Do you believe that?

  We sat together, looking into the darkness beyond the window. He had put on my recording and we were listening to it. I said, Katherine would have been happy for me. I can hear her voice saying, Don’t out-cut me.

  Love reaches beyond death. When we are all gone, the music will still be here.

  Kamal and I are plants with a second flowering. I feel free, as I did in those two brief years before marriage. I asked him, How are you?

  And he answered, I found what I was looking for.

  What would that be?

  Life, and a lover.

  We had not been capable of the miracle of a life together, working and raising children. But he had risked finding me again.

  I spend most of the day practising now, and writing and walking and being with him. Heed the troubadour, burn the dinner, Kamal says. He calls me to come a
nd eat with him. At the table he says, Do you want to hear a joke? Priority is good in all things but death. Is that not good?

  I laugh and answer, Do not die until death comes to you.

  We no longer have a lifetime ahead. And so we live as if we have all the time in the world. With Karachi generosity we excuse each other, say, We were young.

  Years ago, near the Arabian Sea, how good his hands felt on my skin. How good they always feel.

  He has this lovely thing he does with his hips, like he’s playing a soft slow beat on a drum, and he goes far away and takes me with him. Some love does not die. Now Kamal waits for me and I wait for him.

  Our dead are in us and we will be with them soon enough. I live with the living and when I look at Kamal I see the young man I was charmed by as a girl, the bull-of-heaven I loved and left. I see the life-battered man who found me again, timeshaped and wise, still laughing at the absurdity of it all. And when I turn to him—this is the miracle and mystery—his arms are still open to me.

  Sometimes I think, All that struggle? Is that what life is? An excuse to keep riffing until you get back to the first notes?

  Patience is bitter but it has a sweet fruit.

  I want our life-lovingness to go on forever. Love is not ended by that which fills the graveyards and separates mother from child, lover from lover, friend from friend. Katherine died too young. Now I have to play both parts. I still hear her voice and see her fingers on the keys. I have toured with others and Kamal travels with me when I ask him to come which I always do. I play the music she wrote for us. I think of what Jenny Goodnow said: I had opportunities I did not take. I think of what Mor said: On earth it is hard and heaven is far away.

  This morning I asked Kamal to tell me his favourite people and places and he said, You. Your arms, and I said, Oh, that’s only love-talk, and he said, No it isn’t, and I said, Well, I like it.

  I do not think death will come for either of us today. I have so much more to do. There is vastness of eye and hope for another season, a summer and a fall. We are teetering on our own brink. But there is still time. Time to slip between the sheets, with nothing on at all.