The Bones of Grace

by Tahmima Anam

  Afterwards, I said, ‘Tell me what to do.’

  You turned your mouth towards my ear and spoke so softly I could hardly hear you. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please, love me.’

  ‘I love you desperately.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that, Putul.’

  I leaned back and examined your face. There was so much more of you, the skin around your mouth clear so I could see the tiny green flecks where your beard used to be.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it has to be you.’

  I closed my eyes again and pressed my mouth against you. You were holding me now, and stroking my hair, and telling me I was the love of your life, and my blood burned when I heard your words, burned under my cheek where I felt your face against mine, and on my shoulder that had housed your chin, and where you had whispered, that place between my neck and my ear, that was scorched too.

  Because I was in love with you, I absolved myself of the feeling of wrongdoing, even though I knew I was betraying Rashid with every hammer of my pulse. Because I was in love with you, I told myself things would work themselves out. Or perhaps I didn’t think about it at all, because we created a closed world between us, and there was no one else in that world, not even our other selves who might have raised a finger of doubt.

  We couldn’t bear to be apart. We got up to eat and change the music on my laptop. Mo left things for us on the dining-room table, and when he came back they were eaten and there would be some money left for him to go shopping. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ you said. ‘Okay, let’s go. Let’s go to the Hill Tracts.’ We would hire a car. You need permission to go to the Hill Tracts, Bilal at the Shipsafe office said.

  I telephoned Rashid. ‘You sound happy,’ he said. I told him yes, I was. I was eager to get off the phone, but he told me a long story about dinner with his Chinese partners. I would see him in a few weeks, when he was back from Shanghai. ‘Za-jian,’ I said, remembering the greeting from my undergraduate Mandarin class, feeling clever and immortal and like I was on top of the world.

  What will you do? You, the other, didn’t ask. Instead, you sent me messages, sometimes from the other room, or from the beach where you were running. Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair. And: Feeling Good. And: All the Things You Are. I had trouble replying. Once, I wrote: I Wish I Knew What It Is to Be Free.

  I told Bilal I needed a few days off. We went to Foy’s Lake and convinced one of the boatmen to remain on shore while you rowed. ‘I was on the crew team in college,’ you said. ‘What, a hippy like you?’ But you steered the boat expertly, keeping your eyes trained on me as you moved your arms in large, even circles. We stopped in front of a set of stone steps that led out of the lake and into the forest beyond. ‘Shall we get out?’ ‘Of course.’ The dangers of the jungle were nothing against the force of our bond. After a few minutes the trees closed behind us and you kissed me while mosquitoes hummed in my ear. I didn’t care, even this sounded to me like music. ‘Let’s get out of town. We’ll pretend we’re married. Let’s get married.’ I looked down at my wedding ring.

  After a week, Gabriela insisted I continue with some of the work we had begun, so I left you at the apartment with Mo while I collated my interviews and detailed the ongoing destruction of Grace. On one or two evenings Mo and I had our meetings in the dormitory with the pulling crew. At night, you and I behaved as if we were free to do whatever we liked, free to kiss in public or marry each other or just do what people did these days, fall out as easily as we had fallen in. We said nothing to each other about when we would meet again, or under what circumstances, but our fantasies carried us out of Prosperity, out of Chittagong and Bangladesh and out of this hemmed-in moment. You insisted on making no plea to me about Rashid. You would say things to me like ‘If you think these pancakes are good, you should sample the ones my father makes. When you come to Vermont, you can try them.’ Or ‘Let’s go to Paris.’ Or ‘Should we have three children, or four?’ And ‘What do you think about a bathtub at the foot of our bed?’ Instead of ‘Why don’t you leave your husband and marry me?’ When I asked, you just repeated what you had said to me that first night, that I had to decide, that everything was up to me. You said I would have to have the will. This terrified me, and I didn’t bring it up again.

  There were things about you that I noted would annoy me later. Your feet smelled vinegary. There were towels draped over the backs of chairs and glasses half full of water on the floor by the bed. You would get engrossed in whatever you were reading, or listening to, or you would plug in your headphones and run your fingers along the chipped edge of the dining table, and I would suddenly cease to exist, and because I had been in your orbit just moments ago, this would feel like a slight, and I would be jealous of your book, your headphones, the chipped edge of the dining table. After we undressed, out of habit I reached over to play some music, and you stopped me. Everything was embarrassing to me and nothing to you. You didn’t care if Gabriela could hear us, or if I spied you from an unattractive angle. There was no music to float between us, caulking an awkward moment. And you said things. Out loud. Not loving, tender things, but particular things about the particular act and my particular body and its parts.

  There had been no sex education in my life. They didn’t teach us at school, and my mother was prudish on the matter. I thought sex was pornography. Or the other thing, whispering and moaning while the slap and shuffle of bodies was muted by the blanket pulled over your head. Actually, it was the saddest thing in the world. Afterwards, I thought I would die.

  Whatever I’d been doing before couldn’t be called sex any more. Or maybe what you and I were doing couldn’t be called sex – I wasn’t experienced enough to know the difference. All the same, things happened. Unbuttoning. The graze of cheeks, one bristly, one smooth. Tongues. Orgasms. But it wasn’t anything like the familiar motions I had made before. It was whatever made all the blood rush to the lower half of my body, whatever made me dream of your mouth, whatever made me want to say the word ‘pussy’, whatever put the scent of you in my head like a song I can’t shake when I am trying to devise a taxonomy for whale bones, whatever that is. Call it love. Call it insanity. Call it coming home for the first time. Call it my mother, living in my blood. I am yours and you are mine. Call it the beginning of the world. The sex was everything and it was nothing, only a small fragment of the whole, magnificent truth of it.

  When the weekend came around again we took a bus to Noakhali, crossing the Brahmaputra to Bhola, then on to Khulna, where we found a boat bound for the Sundarbans. It did not occur to me until the moment we boarded that I might be recognised, but there were only tourists: a group of Korean men who worked in a glass factory in Chittagong, an elderly German couple, a Swedish diplomat and his family.

  You paid attention to every small thing about me, every scar, every pucker of my skin. We slept together in the lower bunk of the tiny cabin and I felt you breathing into my ear all night and when one of us wanted to turn around we would both have to turn, because the bed was so narrow. You held me and stroked my hair and sometimes, after we made love, you would cry softly into my shoulder. When the boat stopped at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, we were ferried down a tributary and led through a patch of trees to a beach with black sand. I rolled up my trousers and waded into the water. You tore off your shirt and disappeared underwater. I thought almost constantly of your death, that if you were in a plane crash or if you had a heart attack on your way home, no one would think to tell me. I would have been the closest person in the world to you, but no one would have known it. You repeated this to me every day. You said, ‘You’re the closest person in the world to me.’

  We came back from the Sundarbans with plastic bottles of forest honey, promising to write to the German couple. ‘Let’s get an email address,’ you said. ‘That way we can write to people together. As one.’

  Despite all of this, you were a stranger to me. W
hen I asked you what the future held, your answers were baffling. You were still not sure if you wanted to return to graduate school. You said you wanted to make a collage replica of the Liberty Bell. A sculpture out of captured air from every country in the world. You wanted to write a piece of music that would sound the same whether you played it forwards or backwards. You wanted to sing a different song to me every morning when I woke up, all beginning with the sentence ‘Your mouth smells like honey.’ You wanted to play the piano for forty-eight hours straight. You wanted to have twelve children and name them after jazz musicians. You wanted to learn Bangla and watch the films of Satyajit Ray in their original language. You wanted to crowdstitch a piece of cloth that went all the way around the world. Your intensity was contagious, and when I was with you I was brighter and smarter and everything about the world was terrifying, because it was all possible, and this made the prospect of parting with you seem violent, and also a little comforting, because who could live like that all of the time, sick with wanting, everything but the two of us dull and irrelevant?

  On the bus back from Khulna, I felt a tiredness in my legs, the last two weeks coming back to me in slow motion. Days in bed. The mangrove, the guides pointing out Orcaella brevirostris, the pink river dolphins that swam beside the boat, and the crocodile we saw sunning itself on the bank of a tributary. You had a habit of waking up early, though through silent agreement you were always back in bed before I got up. ‘I went for a run,’ you would say, or ‘I was meditating.’ The hair on the back of my head was matted and tangled. You have a love dreadlock, you said, carefully pulling out the knots with a comb and a small dish of coconut oil.

  You frequently mentioned the piano. You believed it was built in a factory in Queens between the two world wars – the best Steinway years, in your opinion; it had a warm, milky tone you had never heard before. Wasn’t there some way we could get the piano out of Grace to restore it properly? With a lot of care, the instrument could be returned to its original sound, the one it was meant to produce, a timbre that contained all of its history, its travels across continents and decades, enduring the tides of oceans and time.

  I asked you why you loved me and you said love’s arguments are always teleological. You love someone because you already love them. You love their particular qualities, because you love them in the wholeness of their being. And because you love them in the wholeness of their being, you love the things about them that wound you.

  You quoted Rumi: ‘The wound is where the light enters you.’

  ‘This was a more complicated answer than I bought,’ I said. ‘I was going for the five-dollar answer.’

  ‘The five-dollar answer is: I don’t know. But I love you despite, perhaps because, you break my heart.’

  ‘If you had a choice, perhaps you would choose to love another person. A better person.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  One day, I suggested I might be able to meet you in Cambridge in the fall. I could go back and talk to my adviser, figure out if there were some way to write up the Ambulocetus data without access to the fossil itself. We were in the middle of a card game. You threw the cards on the table and I thought it meant the game was over and you had won, but instead you went into the bedroom and slammed the door. When I followed, I found you inside the mosquito net with the sheet pulled over your face.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Get out,’ you said.

  ‘I haven’t done anything,’ I said. I knew, as the day of your departure approached, that it was getting harder for you. ‘But I’m sorry anyway.’

  You dragged the sheet away and sat up. ‘What did you think was going to happen when you made me come?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I had taken off my wedding ring and stuffed it into the back of my underwear drawer, but I often caught you glancing at the pale double band of skin that marked where they had been. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. We didn’t utter the word ‘divorce’. The faces of my parents and Rashid and Dolly and Naveed were all blank, everyone a ghost except you. ‘I just wanted to see you, to be near you.’

  ‘Don’t ruin it,’ you said.

  ‘How am I ruining it?’

  ‘I’m not having an affair with you.’

  ‘What do you think this is?’

  ‘This can’t be what we’re doing, Zubaida.’ Your lips were drawn tight around your mouth, and I could tell you were trying to keep from shouting at me. ‘It has to be better than that.’

  ‘You never propose an alternative. You never say, “Come to Cambridge, we’ll live together on Prospect Street, I’ll play the piano at Ryles, you can teach, we’ll buy brownie mix at Trader Joe’s.” Why don’t you do that? Paint a picture, Elijah. Tell me what it’s going to be like.’

  I hadn’t known, until that moment, how much I had resented your not doing all that work for me – making it real, making it comfortable. I was raising my voice now, and for a minute, as you moved inside the mosquito net, I thought you might climb out of there and leave the room and run away from me, but you pounded your fist against the pillow so hard that the whole room seemed to shake, so I went in after you and lay down on top of you while you sobbed, my hands braided through your hair.

  We argued again the next day, about Mo. I had seen the way his eyes followed you around the room, the way he mouthed words after you had said them. He arrived to make lunch for us and there was something about the way he held himself that seemed defeated, as if he had just failed an exam or lost his favourite trinket – I knew he liked to hoard things he found on the ships, that he had a collection of tiny objects, a brass compass, the cap of an expensive pen, the broken clasp of a necklace – so I asked if I could help him prepare the food. When he hesitated, I confessed I was a terrible cook, and he relented then and gave me some instructions, showing me how to cut the okra diagonally while he peeled a small pumpkin.

  We worked together in silence for a while. Then Mo said, ‘Will you and Bharmon get married soon?’

  His delicate elbows were resting against the sink. I said: ‘In foreign, people don’t marry so quickly.’

  ‘In Desh they do.’

  ‘You want to get married someday?’

  He blushed. He had recently shaved his head, and I saw the colour rising up around his neck and his small, pointed ears. ‘As soon as I can marry her, I will,’ he said. I asked him to tell me who, but he refused. He passed me a bigger knife. ‘Apa, now cut the begun,’ he said, passing me an eggplant. Then he squatted in front of the black stone pestle and began crushing an onion. As I began working on the eggplant, he said, ‘You lived in bidesh?’

  ‘For a long time, yes. I was a student in America.’

  He finished the onion and started on another, passing the heavy black rolling pin over it and pulling it back towards himself, back and forth, till it disintegrated into a pale lilac mush. His eyes watered, and he moved his head so he could brush his face against his shirt. ‘I want to go there,’ he said. ‘Do you think Bharmon will take me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He said he loved my cooking.’

  I started to understand something. I left the eggplant and crouched beside him. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, noticing how small his arms were compared with the rolling pin, how narrow his feet as they rested against the stone. ‘It’s very difficult to take people to foreign.’

  ‘He called me “brother”.’

  I wanted to tell him that I knew the feeling exactly, the feeling of being at the centre of your world, that your hunger seemed insatiable and particular, that I too was in its thrall, and also afraid of where it would lead me.

  Mo was crying openly now, and I went back to my eggplant to give him a moment of privacy. He leaned forward on the stone, pulverising one onion after another. Then he scooped everything into a bowl and lit the stove, working quickly, not bothering to wipe his face.

  I wondered what I might offer Mo at this moment, something to make up for having taken
away his trip to America. ‘Do you know reading, Mo?’ I asked. He stopped stirring and turned around to face me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You never went to school?’

  ‘No schools around here.’

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ I said. ‘We’ll start tonight.’

  He started to cry again. I felt the urge to hug him, but I sensed for some reason that this would not be what he wanted, so I just kept my eyes on him as he finished the cooking and put the curries into bowls and set the table.

  The food was very spicy and I could hardly eat it, but you didn’t seem to notice, crowding the dishes onto your plate. I wasn’t hungry anyway. Mo came around and poured water into our glasses. When you thanked him, he slipped into the kitchen without replying. ‘Is there something wrong with Mo?’ you asked.

  ‘He thought you were taking him to America.’

  ‘Really? Oh.’ You were getting good at eating with your fingers, mixing, as I had instructed you, each dish with a little rice.

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, nothing intentional. But maybe I should’ve been more careful.’ You licked the tips of your fingers. ‘I could, you know.’

  ‘You could what?’

  ‘I could take him with me.’

  It was just like an American. You had probably never lined up outside an embassy, wondering whether your visa application would be rejected, never listened to your friends plotting the various ways they could get out of the country for good, never had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you produced your green leather passport to an immigration official at a foreign airport.