by Chaitali Sen
Vic yelled, “I’m not from Sulat, you idiot,” but at least he was backing away. John kept pulling him toward the hallway and the boys kept calling him a fucker of various animals. John wondered if he would have to keep an eye on Vic all night. He wouldn’t be surprised if they vandalized Vic’s door or jumped him when they caught him alone. He never imagined Mount Belet students could become so rabid. It seemed to be such an uncivilized response, but a part of him thought Vic had provoked it.
He took Vic back to his room and listened to him rant a while longer. He said the students here were barbarians. Except for John. John was the only decent one.
John was distracted by how orderly Vic’s room was. There was nothing on the floor. His books actually lined a bookshelf. Vic took a bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He drank from the bottle and held it out to John. John took it, thinking he could use a drink.
“I haven’t been paying attention to the news,” John said. “Do you know what that was about?”
Vic was eager to share his idea. “You know what I think is going on? We’re trying out our new toys. Don’t you remember when the PM was visiting Nixon last year? Do you know at the same time, the foreign minister was in Moscow with Brezhnev?”
John wished he hadn’t asked. This wasn’t his first time hearing Vic’s crackpot theories about politics. In the morning he would read the newspaper instead of filling his head with dubious information from Vic. Then he would talk to Mariam about it. He thought of calling her now to see if she was all right. What if the scene he had witnessed in the lounge represented a prevailing mood at the college? If Mariam felt harassed, or if this invasion spread to the rest of the province, she might have to go home. “I should go,” John said. “I think you should stay in your room for the night.”
Vic was staring at him. “Where are you from, Merchant?”
John looked at the door. This always happened with Vic. He never understood when someone was trying to leave.
“I’m from Alexandria.”
“Where from originally? No one’s from Alexandria.”
That was another one of Vic’s ridiculous assertions. Of course people were from Alexandria. It was the largest city in the country and their capital. It was shabby compared to the more famous Alexandria in Egypt, ‘the pearl of the Mediterranean,’ but one thing they didn’t lack was a native population. “For as far back as we can trace, my family has been in Alexandria,” John said.
Vic didn’t really care. He was only looking for a chance to talk about his own family. “My father’s family came from India. My mother’s father was born in Syria. What did you think I was? What did you think I was when you met me?”
Many answers came to mind. John said, “I didn’t have any idea.”
“Do you know that Merchant isn’t a real family name?” Vic asked. “People took that name to disguise their religious affiliation, so that they could do business with everyone. Merchants can be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Zoroastrian.”
“How do you know this?” John asked.
“I read it in a book. The actual surname was often passed down as a middle name. Is there a common middle name in your family?”
“No.”
“What is your middle name?”
“My parents named us Sonya, John and Theresa. I think we’re Catholic. We can put that mystery to rest.”
Vic scowled. John said again that he had to go.
“Who’s the girl you spend time with? The mousy one.”
“What girl?”
“The girl with the ears. With the Anne Frank smile.”
John looked at his watch. “It’s late. I have a lot to do.”
“Are you fucking her?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“The one you don’t sneak back to your room. Could I meet her? You already have a girl to fuck in your room. You can share.”
When John realized he was talking about Mariam, his palms started sweating. “Leave her alone. She’s not interested in fucking, I can tell you that.”
“Not you maybe.”
“Leave her alone,” he said more emphatically.
“She’s from Sulat, isn’t she? I’ve never spoken to her but I can tell. I have a knack for picking up where people are from by studying their facial features. I can tell from her eyes and her cheekbones, and from the way she carries herself too.” Vic was getting excited. He sounded insane. “Am I right?”
John didn’t say anything. Vic smiled. “I knew it. It must be tough for her. I haven’t seen any other girls here from Sulat. I can’t tell as much with the boys. Boys all look the same, you know, and I don’t want to be caught staring at them. I think they go out of their way to hide their identities.”
John really wanted to get out of there now, but he had to agree with Vic that Mariam stood out. She didn’t quite fit in, and she didn’t try to hide where she was from either. “I have to go,” John said. This time he departed swiftly. If he’d shown the slightest hesitation, he would have been trapped.
He called Mariam’s dorm. When Nina answered, he pretended he had called to see what she was doing. She said she was in the room studying. “Are you alone?” he asked.
“Mariam’s with me,” she said in a hushed voice.
All he had to do was tell Nina to put Mariam on the phone. There was a pause. He had the opportunity. Then Nina said flirtatiously, “I can come over there.”
“I really have a lot of work to do,” John said. “Maybe tomorrow.” He knew he was digging himself a grave. He hung up the phone, cringing, and spent the rest of the night distracted by waves of self-loathing.
The next morning he read the newspaper for the first time in months. In Alexandria he had to read the newspaper every day at breakfast. His father made him and sometimes it was all they had to talk about. His father was more interested in the major powers, the Soviet Union and America and even China, Germany and Japan, countries that seemed to have the ability to determine what happened in the rest of the world. The main paper in Alexandria printed a lot of international news. Its domestic news was repetitive and depressing, full of political fights in Parliament and violence in the outer provinces. Here at Mount Belet, he’d been freed from that ritual of reading the paper. He hadn’t had the time or interest, but this morning, he didn’t want to face Mariam uninformed.
The news about Northern Sulat was all over the front page. Not surprisingly, the tone of the article was heavily biased in favor of the invasion, going all the way back to an insurgence in 1949 that began with a massacre of Catholics. Back then, Alexandria staged a military intervention to protect the Catholic population, and after three years the entire province except for the far north surrendered. That region was still under military occupation, twenty-five years later. They referred to it as the militarized zone.
He wasn’t exactly an expert after reading one article. There were things that confused him. For instance, why did they need to send in paratroopers if the army was already occupying the area? He decided it would be best to see what Mariam knew and try not to talk very much. He waited for her outside the history building where she had an early class. When he saw her come out, he stood in her path. She was wearing her white wool cap and a thick pullover sweater with a geometric pattern across the chest. She wasn’t paying attention and practically ran into him. She looked happy to see him. He asked her if she wanted to walk with him to his class. She said she would like that, and as soon as they started walking, she asked him if he had heard the news. He told her he had seen it last night on television.
“We don’t have a television at Curie,” she said. “My mother called me yesterday evening. I said I hadn’t heard anything and she said that was good, that I shouldn’t talk to anyone about it.”
“You don’t have family in the north, do you?”
She shook her head. “Even people in Sulat
don’t know what goes on in the militarized zone,” she said. “You can’t even travel there from other parts of Sulat, and they aren’t allowed to leave. It’s like a whole other country.”
“That’s strange,” John said.
“What did it look like on television?” she asked. She said she always imagined it to be a very barren place.
“It didn’t look barren,” he said. “But they showed mostly the sky. It was full of parachutes.”
Mariam didn’t understand what he meant, and he tried to describe it further, the surreal drifting of the paratroopers.
“But in the paper they said there was an air raid.”
“There were some planes,” John said vaguely. He didn’t want to tell her about the bombing, or the argument in the lounge.
“I read they dropped a lot of bombs. I think it’s cowardly to kill from the sky, don’t you? My father lost his whole family like that.”
John didn’t know what to say. In his own family, there were no epic tragedies that he knew of. He couldn’t believe Mariam had to carry this burdensome history. Mostly she handled it with grace and innocence but now there was a hint of anger in her voice. He hoped she would follow her mother’s advice and only talk to him like this. He didn’t think other people would understand her point of view, without knowing her and what her parents had gone through.
“I’m sorry about your father’s family. That’s so terrible.”
“When I was little, I took a train trip with my mother to the south of the province, where my parents are from. You could still see the shells of buildings. You could still see the rubble. I never saw those things in English Canal. My mother had to explain to me that there was a war, that the buildings had been bombed. I didn’t know the world could be like that.”
“Was there no fighting in English Canal?” John asked.
She didn’t seem certain. Either there wasn’t much, or whatever was damaged was rebuilt quickly. According to what she knew, it was the northern and southern poles of the province that bore the extremes of the conflict. He thought there was something poetic about that.
“Mariam, I think your mother’s right. You shouldn’t talk to everyone about this.”
“I’m only talking to you. I can trust you, can’t I?”
“Of course, you can.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
He looked at her, almost grabbing her hand, and said, “You can tell me everything.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to worry about me, John.”
They came to the base of the slope leading up to the science building, its thick Doric columns lifting their eyes to the blue sky. Mariam gasped. “You climb these steps every day?”
“Some days it feels more daunting than others. Today is one of those days. I have a few minutes though. We can sit down.”
In reality he had very little time, but he didn’t want to leave Mariam. She seemed to need to talk, and he had missed hearing her voice.
They sat down in the grass.
“John, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“Go ahead,” he said, eager to hear it.
“Do you ever think about your military service? About what you’ll have to do?”
That wasn’t the kind of personal question he’d been expecting. He was too ashamed to admit it was one of the first things he thought about as he watched the news footage last night.
“You can refuse,” Mariam said. “You go to jail for two years, but two years isn’t that long.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
It was a joke, but she was immediately chastened. “It’s true. I’ll never have to make a decision like that. Only I’ve read that people who are sent to do their military service in certain places have to do terrible things. Things they can’t live with.”
“I’m sure that happens,” John said. “But these days, it’s not that bad.” This is what he’d always been told, that his military service would be easy. It was only ten months, including the six-week training, and he could do it at any time before his thirtieth birthday. But he was always told to get it done quickly, before something happened to break the peace. In wartime the service could be extended for years, and he could be called up at any time. If this conflict in Northern Sulat continued to escalate, it could change everything for him.
It was time for him to go to class, but he suddenly felt the urge to lie down, wanting to feel the cool grass on the back of his head. Mariam watched him, looking a little confused at first, but to his surprise, she decided to lie down beside him. They were almost touching. A heavy silence passed between them.
She began to talk again. This time she sounded nervous, her voice trembling.
“I didn’t only see terrible things when I went on the trip with my mother. There were beautiful things too. I still remember when we pulled into Kasbah station at dawn. It was still dark outside and Mama woke me up to look out the window. All the men got off the train and gathered on the platform, and it was completely silent until a man’s voice came chanting over a loudspeaker from the mosque. My mother told me it was the fajr prayer, the call to prayer at dawn. I’ve never forgotten the sound of it. I still dream about that station.”
John thought it was strange for her to feel so moved by a prayer she’d heard as a child, a prayer she didn’t even believe in. Maybe Mariam would always confound him.
“I’ve heard it,” John said. “In Egypt. My parents thought it was a nuisance but I didn’t mind it.” It had sounded melodic to him, but his mother said it sounded like mosquitoes buzzing in her ears.
Mariam’s voice was breathless, full of amazement. “You never told me you went to Egypt! Have you seen the pyramids?”
“I have,” he said, though the experience was wasted on him. He saw filth and commerce and useless things built by slaves. The masses of tourists depressed him and he didn’t want to be one of them. He didn’t see what Mariam would have seen, the effort and the achievement, the humanity of it.
He had a terrible pain in his chest. Though he had never felt anything like it before he knew Mariam was the cause of it. He thought if he turned and saw the blades of grass kissing the skin of her arms and the tips of her ears, he would start to cry. Every part of his body felt tender and weak.
“I should get to class,” he said.
She sat up obligingly and he followed. He stood and was about to offer his hand and help her up, but she said she would sit a while longer. “Thank you for waiting for me, John.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Outside my class. I love talking to you in the morning.”
God help me, he thought. He was too young to feel this way. There was no shortage of beautiful girls in the world, a decent portion of whom were likely to find him attractive. Yes, he would fight it, the same way she fought it. She was the deceptive one, subversively seductive, and he was the beetle in her quivering web.
During John’s final Chemistry exam, bundles of snowflakes settled on the ground. When he stepped outside the world was white. He walked and thought about finding a quiet place, a place for himself, where he could sit and watch the untouched snow, until he saw Mariam standing alone on the bridge, wrapped tightly in her winter clothes, jeans he’d never seen her wear before, heavy boots and a thick ski jacket. Beneath a fuzzy black hat with earflaps sticking out, her face sparkled.
“Here we are again,” she said. She took a step forward and fell into him. It was a shock to feel her forehead pressed against his cheek and the heat of her breath on his neck. “It’s snowing,” she said. “I’m going home tomorrow.”
He put his arms around her. “You’re warm,” he said. His heart was beating like a hummingbird’s wings. “Are you all right?”
Her lips brushed his cheek before she pulled away. She looked over the railing, into the frigid, ghostly mis
t coming up from the gorge. “We should get Nina and find a place to watch the snow. Do you want to?”
That could not have been what she really wanted. What if he said he would rather take her up to his room and forget about the snow?
“Sure, let’s get Nina,” he said. “Stay up all night. Watch the sky.”
They walked silently to her dorm. By the time Nina came down to meet them he was ready for the distraction, which Nina provided, as usual. She tormented them with snowballs in the face. She was pelting Mariam when John managed to knock her over and pin her down into the snow. The snow was wet and heavy. From a lifetime of winter holidays he knew this snow would harden into milky, undulating sheets, appearing opalescent in the morning sun. Nina took a fistful of snow and smashed it across his face. It stung hard, and when he reached up to touch his cheek he couldn’t tell where his fingertips ended and his face began.
He had not heard Mariam’s voice for a while. He stood up and looked around for her.