The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

  Mariam wanted to call John, but she couldn’t, not with Nina hovering. She thought better of it anyway. She wanted him to study, to not lose his head. She would be home by morning and would call him from there. As she finished packing, she asked Nina if she would tell John what happened, and say goodbye for her. Nina promised that she would.

  “You’ve been a good friend to me, Nina.”

  Awkwardly Mariam embraced her. In her life she had not embraced many people. Since childhood, perhaps no one but her mother, and John. It wasn’t the contact that was difficult as much as the anticipation of parting. Nina held on to Mariam’s hands, her head lowered, her eyes downcast. “I knew what he meant to you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Mariam.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

  Her uncle arrived around midnight, demanding a swift exit as he heaved the suitcase off the bed. “Is this all you packed?” he asked. He carried it out without waiting for an answer.

  “He looks like a barrel of laughs,” Nina said.

  Mariam smiled. She looked at her bed, wondering if she would ever see this room again. Her mother would not have called her home for something temporary.

  When she was home, and saw the condition of her father and her mother, she knew she was never going to return to Mount Belet. She couldn’t get a minute alone to call John. She needed to be in the right mindset, now that she understood how final her goodbye would be. By the time she could call, it was already late afternoon. There was no answer. She wondered if Nina had already told him. Maybe she had gone to him last night, and stayed until the morning.

  But in a few days she received a letter from him. He said he hadn’t believed Nina when she told him what happened. He said he couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror. She had taken pieces of him with her, and he wanted to know when she would return them.

  Mariam wrote him back a letter describing her father’s condition in detail, so that he could understand the impossibility of her return to Mount Belet.

  After many weeks went by, she had to admit a sense of relief at being home. She was where she belonged, no longer having to fit into an alien society. And she had no idea if John would have been constant in his attention if she had remained at Mount Belet. Now there was a rhythmic predictability to his letters, and she didn’t have to worry about what he wanted and how fast she could give it to him.

  Not that it was easy by any means to watch her mother working so hard, to know her father was trapped in his body, with memories and feelings and maybe even a full comprehension of language but no means of communicating. Once, when she was trying to get him to take a spoonful of broth, she said to him, “I would never have wished this upon you.” She had been wondering if he remembered how they were together, if he feared her ill will or thought her incapable of sympathy toward him. His lips moved very slightly. She put the spoon to his mouth and he sipped the broth, looking grateful as he swallowed.

  Only sometimes she felt equally sorry for her mother. Sometimes she thought that if things had worked out the way he’d wanted, it would be Elizabeth taking care of him now, not Mama, and that irony seemed very cruel to her.

  In a few months, her mother had his care well in hand, as if she’d been doing this all her life. She gave Mariam a few of the easier chores, at Mariam’s insistence. It would have been useful for her to learn how to drive so she could take her father to his various appointments, but there was no time for that and the money they got from selling his car helped pay for some of his treatment. The real reason for her coming home was clear only after many months. She needed to get a job. Her father started receiving a pension, but it didn’t come close to replacing his salary.

  She was lucky to find a job at the college library a few miles from her house. She did well there and they told her she could earn a library science certificate in one year while she worked. Once she got her certificate, she would be promoted, and then the money would be decent. Mariam thought it was an excellent opportunity. Her mother was more somber about it. It wasn’t what she’d had in mind for Mariam’s education. “You’ll continue your education as soon as we can manage it.”

  “At least I’ll be in a scholarly environment,” Mariam said, trying to get her mother to see the bright side. She was lucky to get a job at the college at all. “I can take other classes later.”

  Mama didn’t look convinced. “I suppose there’s a chance. I was younger than you when I went to work. I had dreams of being a scholar once. Can you imagine?”

  “Couldn’t you go to school in Germany?” Mariam asked. Her mother was only sixteen when they left, surely young enough for high school in Germany.

  “How? We left with nothing. We had to take whatever work we could find to survive.”

  Mariam wanted to know more. It was rare for her mother to talk about Germany, aside from her father’s courtship there. She spoke about that with a somewhat pitiful nostalgia. Mariam asked her what work they did, and she was surprised to hear that her grandmother had worked in a sewing factory, that even Mama had worked there for a short while. “Your grandfather had to work in an aluminum factory.”

  Mariam was shocked. “An aluminum factory? That must have been so difficult for him.” Here her grandfather had been a lawyer, quite a well-known one from what her mother told her. Mariam never knew the exact reason they fled the country so suddenly, and why they went to Germany, to a place where the scars of war must have been so visible. Now, hearing all this talk of factories, she wondered if Germany’s borders were open because of labor shortages.

  “Luckily I was able to get a better job,” her mother went on. “I was very pretty, you know, and my German was excellent.” For the first time in months, her mother allowed herself a little vanity and smiled. She seemed to have forgotten the point she was trying to make about her education. Mariam thought it was a strange coincidence that both of their educations had come to such an abrupt halt. For how many generations had that happened to the girls in her family? Mariam wanted her mother to know that she wouldn’t give up.

  Mama seemed pleased. “Good girl. Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

  Her mother went on to say something that puzzled Mariam. “Don’t pin your hopes on a romance. They never get you anywhere.” She didn’t know if Mama was trying to draw some analogy to her situation with John. She thought she’d been discreet about him. Sometimes she kept his letter sitting in the mail pile for hours, as if she was in no hurry to read it, and Mama had never shown any curiosity about his letters. Mariam concluded that her mother was speaking only of herself, still pondering her aborted education.

  At the college library, Mariam found her calling. After she earned her certificate, she was put on the research floor, where she displayed a certain intuitive gift for developing a productive chain of resources, regardless of the discipline. Her main task was to take research requests from the patrons and draw up lists of sources with the pertinent information that would likely be found in them. She was like the spinner at a spinning wheel, thinning the rough tangles of information into a fine workable thread. She always did a thorough job and won praise for it, and as she handed over her findings there was often a look of tender gratitude, as if the recipient had momentarily fallen in love with her. If she had stayed at Mount Belet, her gift would never have flourished. She would have strived like the others toward higher levels of academic thought and she would have failed.

  She expected at any time that the letters from John would become less frequent and die off, but they kept coming. They had a feverish quality, as if writing to her was a compulsion he couldn’t control. Though he never mentioned other girls, she could read between the lines. When he said things like, “A few of us went swimming in the gorge,” she imagined his hand on some girl’s naked thigh. It was confusing to her, of course, but it would have been absurd for him to make any promises. She herself had no idea what they were to each
other. They were everything and nothing to each other. That was the only way for her to understand it.

  It went on like this for a long time. He said he sometimes needed to hear her voice and he began to call her late in the evenings after dinner, infrequently but enough to cause her mother to disapprove. She asked Mariam to finally explain the nature of their relationship. Mariam couldn’t.

  “I don’t like that, Mariam. Why should it be so complicated?”

  “Because I’m here and he’s there.”

  “So what? Is he courting you?”

  Mariam laughed. “No, Mother. No one does that anymore.”

  Mama was annoyed. “It wakes your father when he calls. You’ll have to tell him to call at a different time.”

  Mariam said she would tell him. “We’re just friends, Mama. Try not to worry.”

  “Maybe there are young men here who would like to be your friend.”

  “I don’t see them knocking down our door,” Mariam said.

  “Well, obviously you have to show some interest.”

  The truth was that she was asked out on a few occasions, invitations that she declined as politely as she could. The more suitable the boy seemed, the more she resisted. She felt it was unkind to lead someone along unless she could resolutely say nothing would go further between her and John. To go out with someone now would make her feel unfaithful, both to John and to the other one. And most of the time, the men who pursued her were not suitable. They were married, or old, or disgusting in some way.

  For instance, there was a widower who had been trying to make conversation with her at the tram stop on College Street. Even though his wife was barely cold in the ground he appeared every day until Mariam began to suspect that he was following her. He was courteous, though obviously stricken with lust. She shrugged him off until one day she was in a bad mood, growing impatient with John’s stalling. Somehow a decision had been made that they would not see each other until he graduated from Mount Belet. She didn’t recall having any part in the decision-making. He simply announced that he would come and see her when he graduated, implying that he would not see her anytime before that. His graduation was still a year away. She wasn’t even ready to see him again, but she felt, as probably her mother had feared, that she was being used and taken for granted.

  So this widower had caught her at an opportune moment. After a few conversations in which he paid little attention to her dull answers to his dull questions, he confessed his undying devotion. She had allowed it because she was finally ready to be done with her virginity, and this man, perhaps in his early forties, was not horrible to look at. Above all he persisted. He endured. He asked her out for coffee. As they drank their coffee he asked her out to dinner. She said, “If you want to sleep with me we can do it now.” He might have wanted more from her but in his position, who could blame him for taking what he could?

  “Do you have condoms? I’m not getting pregnant.”

  “No,” he said. What he had were four children. They were all at his mother’s house, leaving his own house temporarily available.

  “Fine. I’ll get them and meet you.” She had been observing how to do this, in case she ever needed them. They were behind the counter at the pharmacy. She would have to ask for a box and risk being shamed with a look or, worse, a prying question, but it was perfectly legal for her to purchase them.

  “You have to be quick. The children are back at eight.”

  She picked up the condoms at the pharmacy without making eye contact with anyone and met the widower at his house. She passed through it into his bedroom, took her clothes off, got on her back, closed her eyes and let him stroke her and rub his bearded face all over her breasts. He graciously put the condom on and stuck her with his cock a few times, indelicately, efficiently, and it was done, her ponderous virginity shed at last.

  She thanked him.

  “When can I see you again?” he asked.

  “We can’t see each other again. You’ve been a perfect gentleman, but you have to forget about me.”

  He didn’t give her any trouble. She got the sense all of this was too much for him. She said goodbye and rushed home to write a letter to John, the only one who needed to know. In the letter, she all but came out and asked him what his intentions were. She knew he never wanted her to save herself for him. He hinted often that she shouldn’t shy away from certain experiences. Like that crazy boy, Vic, he apparently had no interest in sex with virgins. She was convinced this news would change something for them. It would be unexpected, something to rattle him out of his complacency.

  John called her when he got the letter. He asked her if she was all right and Mariam began to cry. She had no idea losing her virginity would make her so sad.

  FOUR

  After graduation, John decided not to delay his military service. It was hard to tell Mariam that he would spend the summer with his family in Alexandria and start his training in August. They had talked about seeing each other in June, but they had not decided if he would travel to English Canal or if she would come to Alexandria. He knew the time had come for this to end. They had to meet, and either consummate their relationship or allow each other to fall short, to be who they were and not who the other imagined, and finally let their paths diverge. All they needed were a few days, but as soon as he got home and thought of making the arrangements his heart knotted up. He wasn’t ready and the summer passed quickly. He called and told her he just needed to get his military service out of the way. It was all he could think about.

  Mariam sounded weary. “Are you trying to avoid making a decision about me, John?”

  It was a fair question he didn’t know how to answer. “Have you made a decision about me?”

  She didn’t answer him either.

  The morning before he was to leave for his training he escaped from the house and went to the call center. Because his parents and his little sister were always hovering around him he could barely get time alone to write a letter, much less have a private conversation. They would want her to be explained, Mariam, who couldn’t be explained.

  “Are calls to English Canal going through?” he asked the clerk, who told him no one had tried yet that morning. He tried, but his call did not go through. He went home to finish packing. The last thing he packed was the compass she had given him on his nineteenth birthday. Every time he held the compass he remembered that morning, how he had asked for her, knowing she would come.

  The compass was always cold. It made his palm ache. He only wanted to handle it when he packed it, yet he always packed it. He wouldn’t dream of leaving it behind.

  From the training camp he wrote her two or three times a week to keep her from worrying. He described the monotony of his days. The morning siren sounded at five, followed by a bunk inspection, company formation, and a five-mile run before breakfast, then three hours of physical conditioning, infantry school, and weapons maintenance. Lunch. Afternoon training varied from day to day, ranging from moral education lectures to poison gas simulation, team challenges, dinner, barrack and camp chores, and finally an hour of personal time before lights went out. It was a kind of managed hardship, unpleasant in the moment but not without its rewards, and made easier by its well-defined duration. During the physical conditioning, when he felt like his lungs were going to cave in, he thought about his body getting stronger, about the human body and its evolution, its beauty, and he welcomed the exhaustion at the end of each day. It was an orderly and dispassionate regimen, with none of the warmongering Mariam had feared. He told Mariam he was unlearning a lifetime of self-serving individualism, that this was an important part of becoming a man. He wanted her to understand this, but in three weeks he didn’t get a single letter in return. Her silence was alarming. He was going to give up his one weekly phone call to get in touch with her, instead of his parents, but before he got the chance he was called in to see Staff
Sergeant Abraham, a man built like a silverback gorilla, with eyes too close together on a broad, flat face. The staff sergeant told him to sit down. He held a manila envelope, its bottom bulging. He began by saying the commanding officers had praised John for his discipline, and John thanked him for the compliment, thinking this must have been a routine evaluation. The fact that they had noticed his ability to stay collected and alert under pressure filled him with some measure of pride.

  He kept glancing at the manila envelope, which Abraham now tapped with two fingers.

  “You have a most ardent admirer,” he said, smiling with one end of his mouth. He widened the opening of the envelope and let John have a glance at the contents. Little white envelopes, Mariam’s envelopes.

  “I wasn’t aware that you screened letters, sir.”

  “Only if there’s a cause.”

  “Have I done something wrong? I thought I was allowed to receive letters here.”

  Abraham leaned back in his chair. “Do you know anything about this girl’s family?”

  John didn’t know if this was a real question. He didn’t want to answer. “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you know anything about her province? About her people?”

  That seemed like an entirely different question. “I’ve never been to Sulat, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “This girl’s grandfather was a radical. He was a socialist and a separatist.”

  “Was he?” John asked. He knew immediately he’d made a mistake. It sounded snide, like a challenge. Abraham squinted, his eyes becoming oblong slits. “I didn’t know that,” John clarified. “But I’ve never heard her talk about her grandfather. Did she write something about him in her letters? I would be surprised by that, if you don’t mind my saying, sir.” John was nervous. He told himself to keep quiet before he said something that got either of them in trouble. He wondered if they had intercepted his letters as well, if she had received any of them. If she had not received a single letter from him, he was afraid she would give up on him completely.