by Chaitali Sen
John went ahead of Vic. They entered the shabby vestibule of their building, where the fleur-de-lis pattern of the wallpaper, barely visible under layers of dust and smoke stains, suggested a more stylish past. He pulled his keys out of the paper bag before he reached the top of the stairs. At his door, he fumbled around the keyhole until Vic took hold of the keys and let him in. John turned to him. “Thank you,” he said. He was grateful Vic had come to get him, but he couldn’t talk to him now. “I’ll come and find you later.” He let the door slam shut and locked it behind him.
He stood still in the foyer, listening. He didn’t hear a sound beyond the blood rushing in his ears. He switched on a light and walked carefully through the apartment. The bedroom door was ajar. They always left it that way, but he stopped before reaching it, called out to Mariam, and waited for the silence to settle. He looked inside and saw the bed exactly as they had left it that morning. During the riots they had locked themselves in this room, grieving the loss they’d suffered together, their grief seeping into the sheets, the mattress, the floor. When they came out of it, the air was still thick with smoke and the canal wall was shattered. They were under martial law, but the only thing he cared about was Mariam.
He closed the door and went to the kitchen, switching the light on, finding a glass, filling it with water, drinking. Then he took the glass to the liquor cabinet and filled it with whiskey. He drank it in a long swallow that burned his throat and made his body feel like it was overheating from its core. He put an ice pack on his head and wandered into the dining room. It was still cluttered from a small gathering they’d had only a few days earlier, just the two of them and their neighbors, to celebrate the arrival of a book he was going to publish in England. He only had one review copy, sent by parcel post, and Mariam had swooned over it. She kept repeating how proud she was, how proud she was. “Let’s celebrate,” she insisted. It only occurred to him now how strange that was, how it must have appeared to their neighbors as a kind of mental breakdown when she showed up at their door asking them to come and toast a book they didn’t even know had been written. What was there to celebrate when their world was falling apart, and why didn’t Mariam share their dread?
On Saturday she made hors d’oeuvres and opened a bottle of cheap champagne. She displayed the book on the table, and eight people stood around it choking their champagne flutes and staring at the book, waiting for it to do something extraordinary. John was afraid to look at anyone. He felt foolish, presenting people with a book that was going to be published overseas and read by no one. And the arrival of the book had shaken him, as if contained within it was not a geological history but a chronicle of his mistakes, layers of them, page upon page.
Not when it was in pieces, when it was nothing but a mess of papers and notebooks filled with scribbles and drafts and ideas he had endless chances to articulate in the isolation of their cabin, not when work and sex were of the same continuum, when their whole existence was a perfect darkness, filled with a profound connection to each other and everything around them, but in this bound form, which came about after, after he brought her here. A confluence of factors made it necessary for them to leave that life behind. That was what he told himself but a small part of him had wanted a reprieve, some possibility for escape. Sometimes the escape was all he could think of. He imagined it so fully that when he finally did get away, all of the things he’d imagined simply happened, as if they’d been pre-arranged. At the International Geological Congress his confidence was infallible, his future suddenly opening up before him. On his last evening, he spoke to an American woman at the hotel bar, and he spent the rest of the night fucking her in her room. To plunge into her unfamiliar body seemed like a fitting end to his trip, the only thing left to do, but on the flight home he wished he could die, that every strange grinding noise could be the last breath of the engines. He came home late, exhausted, feeling ashamed and transparent. He saw Mariam at the top of the stairs, saw her take in and shake off the look of him. By the time he met her on the stairs and took her into his arms she had recovered, remembering her news. She was pregnant again. She’d been afraid to say anything before he left, but she was already at fifteen weeks, and there was a heartbeat and a fetus that was the right size. “Did you suspect anything?” she asked. He must have, but he couldn’t remember. He could not remember anything about her body before he left, but he was grateful, so grateful for the distraction.
At her strange party someone commented on the cover. It featured a stark black-and-white aerial photograph of the Belet River Valley, all of its gorges obscured by a thick cover of foliage except for the largest one, the one that cut through the campus of Mount Belet College. That great earthly gash was pictured at the bottom right corner, just below his name. Mariam had found the photograph in the college archives. They had met on a bridge above that gorge.
There was no question of authorship. It was a book about the geology of their country, written by a geologist, but he knew it was more than that, more than what it would have been if he had tried it alone. The book needed something other than land features and rock records. It needed something to connect the geography and the geology of the country, to populate and inhabit the land and give the account some warmth. Because it wasn’t his area of study Mariam was the one who provided all that research. They discussed it often, struggling together to understand the link between geology and humanity. It was miraculous to her that these mechanistic forces inside the earth had created civilizations that bound people for generations to one place, those generations consuming elements of the land, putting the land in their blood, and returning their blood to the land. It was beautiful to her in a way he couldn’t quite understand, and sometimes he felt he lacked something when he saw her moved so deeply. She was obsessed with earth as a place, but place only has meaning for people, for humans and their consciousness. For him it was an interesting puzzle for the earth and all its compulsions and humanity and all of its compulsions to exist together. They were opposing forces advancing toward each other in a long, quiet, bloodless war, and the earth would win—there was no doubting that. Only the earth that supported human life would die, but the planet itself, the sphere of rock and fire, would go on until it was consumed by something more powerful. He knew she understood that, perhaps too personally, and the book to her was like a still life painting in a museum, capturing something before it was lost forever. But all of it would be lost. The book, the painting, the museum itself.
She wrote whole passages that were left untouched throughout the book. In essence they had written it together. He had this realization only now, as he stared at the book and the sad remnants of their celebration. He swore the truth of it hadn’t struck him before. He remembered how much he struggled to find a way to explain her contribution, and how the dedication alone had crippled him. He’d wanted something poetic, but in the end all he could settle on was the simplest, for Mariam, having deleted all the clauses he had attached previously, my love, my savior, my paradise, my home.
When he did dare a glance in her direction during their belabored celebration, he recognized a glint in her eyes. Rage. Stifled, but unmistakable.
PART ONE
Mount Belet
ONE
A silky fog had fallen over the hilltop. At four in the morning, after finishing his chemistry lab, John left the science building and made his way down a long series of broad steps to the bottom of the hill. Instead of crossing into the grassy common at the center of campus, he took the long way, walking along the road that looped around the university, because he had never seen it in a fog like this. His mind was tired, half-asleep, but his senses were alive. He enjoyed the light touch of mist on his skin and the diaphanous patches of light from scattered windows and street lamps. He enjoyed the quiet, the softness of his footsteps, until he approached the suspension bridge and his footsteps were drowned by the whitewater thrashing at the bottom of the gorge.
&nbs
p; He stopped on the bridge, surprised to see a girl leaning far over the railing. When she backed away from the railing he continued walking, intending to pass her, but she turned to him, obliging him to say something.
“You’re not going to jump, are you?”
“I like to listen to the water,” she said. “I never get to during the day.”
He couldn’t see her well. He went to the railing and stood next to her, and together they looked out into the turbulent haze. “I wonder if people ever change their minds, after they jump,” she said.
“I’d never go this way,” he said. “Why smash yourself against a rock when you can die quietly in your bathtub?”
She had a pretty laugh. He turned his head to get a closer look at her, but all he could see at first was that she wore a white wool cap pulled down to her ears, which were large. Besides that everything was well-proportioned. On her thin face her features were spaced nicely apart, and seemed to belong together. He offered to walk her back to her dorm, and as they walked he told her where he was from and she told him the same. She was from a strangely named town called English Canal, in the center of Sulat Province. He had never met anyone from Sulat before. He wondered if her accent was regional, or if she just had a uniquely lilting cadence to her speech.
“I’ve heard of English Canal,” he said.
“You have?” She was delightedly incredulous. Her step was so exuberant he had trouble keeping up with her.
“Of course. There’s a polytechnic there.” The College of Sulat Province had a good enough reputation that he’d heard of it in Alexandria, but no one from Alexandria wanted to go there.
“Yes,” she said excitedly, “and also a canal, built by the English, in case you couldn’t guess. We also have an English Market and an English Tavern.”
“Sounds like the English did important work there.”
She laughed at his joke.
Besides his knowledge of the polytechnic, which impressed her, he knew nothing else about her province. He did know there had been a military conflict there a few years before they were born. Some men of his father’s generation had been sent there to fight. He had grown up hearing snippets about it—it was impossible not to—but he couldn’t have discussed the conflict with her with any hope of sounding intelligent. Neither of them brought it up. Thankfully it had no place in this conversation.
Her dormitory was far from his. It had had two wings separated by a central arch with entry doors on either side. He gathered she lived in the east wing, for that was where she stopped him. There, in the faintly lit archway, he saw her more clearly. She reminded him of a woodland animal, her fawn-colored skin and dark brown eyes as wide and curious as a wild cub’s. She smiled with a slight overbite of small, crooked, very white teeth. Her name was Mariam.
“It was nice to meet you, John Merchant.”
“You too,” he said, and he put his hand out. She looked at it, seeming unsure of what to do before she clasped her own hand into his. Their handshake was brief, a clammy meeting of palms, and they each let go in a hurry. He put his hands in his pockets and watched her unlock the door.
She pulled the door open. It looked heavy and he took the handle, holding it open for her. “Goodnight,” she said sweetly, and it made him feel lonely, or homesick; it left him wanting for comfort. He must have slipped into a liminal state of exhaustion. There was no more solace in staying awake.
“Maybe I’ll see you around,” he said, but she was already inside, skipping up the stairs.
He found her again three days later, unexpectedly, at a prized table on the top floor of the library, next to a wide stained glass window. She was asleep, her cheek resting on her folded arms, her thumb dangerously close to her mouth, her lips slightly parted, her eyelids shut and unwavering, and a perfectly soothing yellow light falling over her like a blanket. He sat down across from her and took his books out, marveling periodically at how long she could sleep in that position. After a half hour she lifted her head. He thought she would look at him forever, trying to bring him into focus, but then she recognized him and smiled sheepishly, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
“You weren’t drooling,” he said.
“Snoring?” she asked, fearful of his answer.
“You snore like a baby,” he teased. “You need coffee.”
“This spot will be gone if we leave it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll find you another place to take a nap.”
They went to the all-night coffee bar at the student union, where the coffee always smelled faintly of piss. She took hers milky. They carried their coffee and heavy bookbags into the main lounge, a long vaulted room meant to resemble the great hall of a castle. They walked past rows of narrow tables, lit with banker’s lamps, and sat on a bench by the tall windows at the far end of the hall. He loved the view from this window, down the slope to the slate gray rooftops of the boys’ dormitories.
“What are you working on?” she asked him.
“Organic chemistry.”
“Are you studying medicine?”
“No,” he said, “but my father is a doctor.”
She waited for him to say more. When he didn’t she continued her questioning.
“Is it difficult to be the son of a doctor?”
He thought it was a strange question. Maybe she had picked up some tension in his voice; it was everyone’s wish and expectation that he become a doctor. “Difficult?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head with a little laugh. “Never mind. That’s personal.”
“It’s all right. It’s not that it was difficult. Illness just doesn’t interest me. Does that make me sound callous? I think I’d like to be involved in research,” he said.
She looked thrilled. “What kind?”
“You know,” he said, stalling. “I’m curious about the origins of things.” He saw her brows twitch. She could probably tell he was lying, that in these first few weeks of school he had not been curious about much except this sudden sea of unmoored girls.
“What kinds of origins?” she asked.
John had to think. “How the earth formed, for example. How it became habitable.” He trailed off, getting bored with his own voice.
She fell into a silence, sadly sipping at her awful coffee. Then she looked around to see if anyone else was listening, and leaned forward so she could tell him something in secret.
“Until this moment it never occurred to me that the earth wasn’t always here,” she said. He was shocked by her ignorance, but touched by her bashful confession of it.
“It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t occur to most people,” he said.
“It’s more than that. I don’t feel smart here.”
“I’m sure you’re smart. I can tell you’re smart. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
She blushed. “I should get back to work,” she said.
He didn’t let her go just yet. He asked her what she’d been reading about in the library, before she fell asleep, and he watched her lips as she tried to explain the French Revolution. He pretended to pay attention, more intent on figuring out if he thought she was pretty or not. She wasn’t a ravishing beauty, but she was cute, as only a girl with big ears can be, and there was something in her voice, something melodious and stimulating. As strange as it was to compare her voice to a flower, the word fragrant came to him. He could have listened to her all night. It surprised him how much he wanted to be around her, even platonically, without the pressure of sexual attraction.
“The problem is,” she said, “I can do the readings in French, but I have trouble conversing. I can’t understand the professor’s questions. Her French is very fast, and I have to ask her to repeat. My ear is terrible.”
“You were reading in French?” John asked. He had not noticed something as obvious as the language of her te
xtbook, during the minutes he sat across from her as she slept. He had always thought himself to be observant.
“Do you have any French?” she asked.
“A little. My German is better.”
“I don’t know any German,” she said, as if she ought to. She was truly lacking in confidence.
“Give me your number,” he said forcefully. “I’ll call you.”
She wrote her number on a napkin and handed it to him. “That’s the number for our floor. I don’t have my own telephone.”
“It’s all right if I call you?”
“If you want to. It isn’t forbidden or anything.”
He called her the next day and they met for a few concentrated hours of productive study. After that, they began to see each other every day. He hoped some of her diligence would rub off on him, but instead he found things about her to distract him. Her clavicle on her right side was more pronounced than the one on her left, for instance. One day he saw that a seam on the side of her dress was splitting, just above her hip, revealing a little patch of skin that otherwise never saw daylight. He put his finger in it and she flinched, like she’d been burned with a cigarette, before she looked down and saw it for herself.
“This is my favorite dress,” she said.
Part of him couldn’t help but wonder if she hadn’t staged this worn seam incident to pique his curiosity, because lately his curiosity threatened to smother him, but she didn’t seem capable of that kind of manipulation. From what he could tell she was genuinely unable to tolerate any part of him brushing against her. Every time he tested her boundaries, she would shift ever so slightly, and if he pushed any further she would slink away like a kitten.
On a mid-autumn day that felt like summer, all the students gathered like seals on the lawn. John and Mariam also sat out on the lawn by the obelisk, with the required gap between her right thigh and his left thigh, leaving enough space to avoid any, God forbid, bumping of knees. She commented on the fact that he was reading a novel. He explained that it was for Composition, that he would have to write a paper on it and after much deliberation he concluded that actually reading the book might make writing the paper easier.