The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

  “Did Mariam go home?” he asked.

  Nina sat up. “John, look.”

  He saw her then, not far away, lying still in the snow. He ran over to her, every step a slow heave. When he finally reached her he fell to his knees, lifted her head and brushed the snow off her face. She didn’t open her eyes. “Mariam?”

  “Is she all right?” Nina called out.

  “Go to the call box,” he yelled, “Get us a car, quickly.”

  “Those things never work.”

  “Just go, Nina, what else is there to do?”

  He picked Mariam up and carried her down to the road. Nina was right about the call boxes not working; they had to flag down a car to take them to the infirmary. Nina got into the backseat and waited as he laid Mariam across the seat with her head on Nina’s lap. He rode up front with the driver, who proceeded with maddening care along the slippery roads. Mariam was awake now, trembling violently and crying. She said she wanted to go home. By the time they got to the infirmary, Mariam had recovered a little and seemed determined to walk, but a nurse came to the door and practically threw her onto a gurney and took her away.

  The infirmary had the look and feel of a monastery, quiet and austere. While Nina filled out paperwork, John stood by a lancet window looking out to a courtyard, mesmerized by the snow still tumbling through the sky. He listened to Nina and the nurse talking about Mariam and her parents, about how to let them know she was sick and wouldn’t be getting on a train tomorrow.

  After that they sat for a while, waiting for nothing in particular. The nurse told them it was just a flu and she had to sleep it off. They were sent away. He dropped Nina off in front of her dormitory. She was returning to Alexandria early in the morning. “I have an exam tomorrow,” he said. “I won’t be able to see you off.” Actually his exam was at noon. She said she would miss him. “Will you try to see me in Alexandria?” she asked. He said he would try.

  The next day, he went back to the infirmary to see Mariam.

  “Not now,” the nurse said. “Her fever’s up again. You can come back tomorrow.”

  “I’m leaving tonight,” he said.

  The nurse was unsympathetic.

  She smirked when he returned the next morning. As she held the door open she said, “No funny business.”

  The room was gray and silent. He sat beside the bed and watched her sleep for a long time. She was restless, her skin and hair drenched. There was something so cleansing about fevers, after their break, and that was how she appeared to him, cleansed, wrung out and purified. They had dressed her in a thin, white cotton nightgown. It clung to her body, to the small roundness of her breasts. He could see the dark of her nipples and after a while, ashamed of himself, he lifted the sheet up to cover them. Then he kissed her forehead and woke her up.

  She opened her eyes. Her irises appeared darker, obsidian black against the white sterility of the bedsheets. There was a clarity, a lucidity to them, a confidence he had never seen before, and he wasn’t even sure she recognized him until she whispered his name. When he touched her cheek she wrapped her fingers around his wrist, and he kissed her burning lips, felt her burning tongue on his. As the warmth of it coursed through his body her nails dug sharply into his skin. It felt like she would never let him go.

  The nurse walked in, intrusive with her scolding and sighing, but he managed to stay long enough to kiss the bridge of Mariam’s nose. Eventually she closed her eyes again, and let go of him, and the nurse urged him to leave her.

  Outside he studied the crescent-shaped grooves her nails had made on his wrist. Slowly the indents filled and the marks faded, but he would never forget the tightness of her grip.

  TWO

  Mariam was nervous about seeing her parents again. She was afraid they would not recognize her, and at the same time afraid they would fail to notice how different she was. Something had happened. At last something had happened in her quiet little life.

  Only her father met her at the train station. When she saw him she realized she’d all but forgotten his existence for the last four months. He was both younger and taller than she remembered him, and happier. It made sense to Mariam that her absence would have had a curative effect. Their relationship was always strained, and he’d had a break from it for four months.

  “Feeling better?” he asked. His tone was so light she wondered if he was in love again.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You’ve lost weight.”

  “I was sick. I couldn’t eat anything.”

  “I hope you’ll eat today. Mother’s been cooking all day for you. She was so disappointed when you couldn’t come home on time.”

  On the drive home, she looked out the window at the townhouses lining the canal. They were abandoned and blighted throughout her childhood, but they looked quite nice now, most of them converted into apartment buildings. She loved walking for miles along the canal. She wished she could get out of the car and walk along it now.

  When they pulled up in front of the house, her father got out to retrieve her bags from the trunk. Mariam’s legs felt heavy as she walked up the path to the front door. Their white bungalow looked the same, neat but dull. She found her mother in the kitchen, vigorously rolling dough into little discs, tossing flour onto the discs to keep them from sticking to the pin. Her hair was falling out of a loose bun and even like this she was beautiful, elegantly beautiful with her high cheekbones and light eyes, a beauty that was out of step with her life.

  She stopped in the doorway, trying to separate all the emotions churning inside her. She had missed her mother desperately, and had needed desperately to be away from her.

  “I’m here, Mama.”

  Her mother looked up and remained still for a moment. Mariam could see she had noticed. This girl was not the same one that had left.

  With her floured hands her mother came forward and took Mariam into her arms. “My darling, you’re so thin.”

  “I couldn’t eat,” Mariam said.

  “I know, but you’ll eat now.”

  She was sent her to her room to wash up and change out of her travel clothes. “Don’t be long,” her mother said. “I want to hear all about your friends. You have a letter already.”

  She ran upstairs to her room. There it was, on the desk, an envelope from Nina. She decided to leave it for later. After she washed up and changed into one of her comfortable old dresses, she went back to the kitchen. Her father was in the house now, sitting at the kitchen table across from her mother who still labored over circles of dough with her rolling pin. How much bread did her mother think she could eat? Her father was reading the paper, holding it up like a shield to protect him from dustings of flour. Mariam had never seen them together like this, simply sharing a room for no practical reason.

  “Can I help?” Mariam asked.

  Her mother smiled, handing her the rolling pin and turning to the stove to heat up the oil.

  There they were, the three of them in a line, her mother frying flatbreads, Mariam rolling them out, and her father reading the newspaper. “How does it feel to be home?” her mother asked, but it was difficult to carry on a conversation over the hissing oil and the rolling pin knocking against the wooden board, and the crackle of the newspaper as her father turned and flattened the pages. “It was snowing when I left,” Mariam said. Despite the elevation and the pine trees, English Canal got snow once in a decade.

  “Did you enjoy the snow?” her mother asked.

  “I didn’t get to see enough of it before I got sick, but it was very beautiful.”

  When the snow began she had waited for John on the bridge. It was cold and she waited a long time. She wanted to say goodbye to him there, in the spot where they’d met, and ask him not to forget her over the holiday. As soon as he appeared she felt ill. She wanted to walk in the snow with him all night but she could barely st
and. But he came to her in the infirmary. She was certain he had come, that she had not dreamt it.

  Mariam lost her concentration, too aware of her private thoughts. She looked up to see if her father was looking at her. He wasn’t. She turned and saw her mother, one hand resting on her hip and the other holding a pair of tongs, suspended a few inches above the oil, ready to swoop down and retrieve the bread when it was exactly the right color.

  “Mama,” she said. Her father put his paper down.

  She tapped her mother on the shoulder and made her turn around. “You’re pale,” her mother said, laying the tongs down and putting her warm hands on Mariam’s cheeks. “Has your fever returned?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You shouldn’t be standing in a hot kitchen. What was I thinking?”

  “I’m fine,” Mariam said. “I’ll just lie down for a few minutes.”

  Her father went back to his paper, silently.

  She climbed the stairs to her room and opened the window. Looking out at the placid canal, she gathered the courage to read the letter from Nina. She ripped it open and read it, her heart racing. There wasn’t any mention of John. Mariam was relieved, drawing many conclusions from the letter and changing her mind about them minutes later. Perhaps his attentions were real after all. She had never before been so distracted and exhausted by her feelings. She curled up in her bed and fell asleep wondering.

  She waited for a letter from John, but nothing came.

  After the holidays another letter came from Nina, a response to a letter Mariam had written. This time Nina talked about John, about spending time with his family and exchanging gifts for Christmas. She talked about his sisters and their annoying habits. The whole letter was about John. She wept against the hard floor and nothing, not even her mother’s frantic footsteps on the staircase could stop her.

  Soon she was in her mother’s arms, surrendering the letter. While her mother read the letter Mariam sobbed convulsively.

  “Why are you crying?” her mother asked.

  “He was my friend,” Mariam cried. “She took him away. She knew what to do with him.”

  “This boy in the letter?”

  “Yes.”

  Her mother stroked her hair. “Of course, you don’t have any experience. Did he encourage you?”

  Mariam thought for a minute.

  “He always sought me out. He listened to me.”

  Her mother didn’t ask her anything more about it, allowing Mariam to cry until she was exhausted. When she was done Mama said, “He’s only the first. There will be others. There are others. When you go back, open your eyes and you’ll see them.”

  Mariam sat up, feeling indignant. “No, Mama, there was one. He found me on the bridge. We talked until the sun came up.”

  “Let this one go. You have to change how you feel about him, that’s all.”

  Mariam wished she hadn’t made a scene. Her mother was not the least bit qualified to advise her on matters of love.

  Over the next few days she came to understand that her memories of the infirmary couldn’t be trusted. She had clung to something that could have been a fevered hallucination. The important thing was that John had befriended her and saved her from her loneliness. As a test of her strength she decided to compose a letter to the both of them. It was a dull letter about her dull life but at least she had overcome her grief to write it. Afterwards she was able to settle into a routine more easily. She read novels and took long walks along the canal and thought about her future, trying to imagine the kind of woman she wanted to become. She spent time with her parents, who sat together in various rooms of the house just talking about subjects for which she had no context.

  She still waited for the postman every day. At last she received something from John, a postcard. It was a painting, a portrait of a girl holding a book. He wrote that he saw the painting in the national museum and thought of her, that he wanted to know how she was, that he was looking forward to seeing her at school and that he missed her. She read it over and over until it became meaningless. When nothing new came, she was unhappy again.

  She must have looked pathetic. One day as she walked across the living room, her father turned off his television program and spoke to her.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Your mother’s at the market. Let’s go and meet her there.”

  “I’m reading.”

  “It hurts your mother that we don’t talk. We ought to make an effort.”

  Reluctantly she set out on a walk with her father along the canal, toward the market. It was another cold gray day, and the water in the canal was dark, almost black, carrying little more than fallen leaves and rubbish. It occurred to her now that she’d never known where this canal began or ended. She asked her father. Since he was a civil engineer, it would give them something to talk about. He delighted in starting from the very beginning. He told her the canal followed an ancient trading route. It was built by the Ottomans and expanded by the British in the late nineteenth century. They used it to transport marble and other building stones and had planned to extend it as far as Alexandria, but they left before ever finishing the project. It was the canal that had inspired her father to become a civil engineer. He wanted to build “beautiful infrastructure.”

  When he finished there was nothing more to talk about. They were almost at the market when he took hold of her wrist. She was caught in the shadow of his tall frame, his shoulders hunching over her in utter defeat. His long face, once firm and handsome, was sagging now, deformed. “Are you ever going to forgive me, Mariam?”

  “Forgive you for what?”

  He didn’t seem to have any idea. “For leaving? For Elizabeth?”

  “I don’t even remember Elizabeth,” she said.

  “I’m trying, for your mother’s sake, because she wants us to get on better.”

  “You’re making it worse, Daddy. You think everything has something to do with you.” She had not wanted this kind of conversation. The walk had started with her feeling charitable toward her father. “The truth is I don’t even think about you. I forget about you all the time.”

  “I wish you would tell me what I’ve done.”

  “You don’t love me,” Mariam said. “You don’t love Mama.”

  “I do love your mother. I came back for her.”

  Mariam knew he was lying. He tried to love her, and that was not the same. “All she does is cook and pray,” Mariam informed him. “She thinks she’s doing everything right and you still don’t love her.”

  “You were a child, Mariam. You think you know what happened but you don’t.”

  “I know you don’t want to be here. It’s all I know. It’s all I’ve seen of the world.”

  Mariam looked out at the canal, trying to stop herself from saying any more. Everything she said now came from her fears about John, not her father, and she wanted to stop before she upset the equilibrium her mother had found with him.

  “You’re nothing like your mother,” he said.

  “Thank God,” Mariam said. “It was not at all true. She wished she could be as forgiving as her mother.”

  Her father gave up on their walk. He said he was going back home, and she went in the opposite direction, to the tram stop. The next one came quickly and she rode down to College Street, a diagonal thoroughfare connecting Canal Street to the College of Sulat Province. Mariam had been surprised to hear that John had heard of this place. For a long time, she was afraid it would be her only option. She didn’t know what she would have done there. Its humanities and language departments were weak and the curriculum was all about redoing—rehabilitating, reconstructing, reintegrating a war-torn population. People here were obsessed with the war. They were always anxious even when there was nothing to fear. She had learned this behavi
or from everyone she’d grown up with and she hated them for it. Mariam had wanted to leave so she could learn how other people lived. How it was to live without the past weighing on you like a leaded smog. That was how John and Nina lived, unburdened.

  Still, she loved to visit the bookstores on College Street. She browsed for a while and ran into one of her former classmates sitting at an outdoor café with a boy. Mariam didn’t know her well, but she had not allowed herself to know any of her classmates well. She had wanted to get away, and getting away was as much of a mental process as it was physical. After a cordial exchange with her old classmate, Mariam kept walking toward the college library. She spent the afternoon there, distractedly reading articles about the canal as she analyzed her argument with her father. It had begun with him asking for forgiveness, which had enraged her, and she realized it was his approach that was all wrong, the fact that he came to her with a plea, not an offer. She must have been entering a new phase of her life, because nothing felt more important than to be offered something. Yet she was tired of not loving her father. He had survived a difficult life and she wanted to love him.

  There was a detailed article about the canal in an international geographic magazine. In the article, it described a time during the war when the canal had become so clogged with corpses it dammed up the water. She asked the librarian to make a photocopy and went home to present the article to her father. She found him in his study. As she came through the door, he pulled his seat up close to his desk and set both hands stiffly in front of him.

  “I saw this article about the canal,” she said, giving him the photocopy.

  His eyes moistened as he read the beginning. “It’s about the war so I don’t know if you’ll want to read it. I know you don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Your mother doesn’t like me to talk about it,” he said.

  “Did you talk about it with Elizabeth?” she asked. She could feel her resentment rising again, and brought up Elizabeth to counter his indictment of her mother. Even if it were true, Mariam was loath to let him forget his transgressions. Later she would realize she’d lost an opportunity to defend her mother, if she had not been so intent on attacking him. She should have told him what her mother had done for him a year earlier, during a period when Mariam and her father were arguing constantly. She had found his every word to be false and cloying and used a tone with him that would have been unimaginable to anyone who knew her outside her home. That period ended only after Mama came up to her room and told her about the stray bomb that had fallen on his apartment block, killing his family—his mother, father, and sister—and all of his neighbors. Her father had narrowly escaped it because he was at the post office sending an application to the University of Stuttgart. He’d left his home as a son and brother, and returned to a pile of rubble and ash. Until then, her father’s tragedy had only been alluded to. Mama told her how different it was for her. She and her parents had escaped in the early days of the war, before the air raids, when she was only sixteen, but her father had to endure the fighting for a year before he was able to escape to Germany. The story had not moved Mariam as much as it should have. She thought, with a twinge of guilt, that he was already a young man, not an orphaned child. She didn’t know why it was so difficult to feel sympathy for him, and she wished for the coldness in her heart to fade.