by Chaitali Sen
He didn’t want it to happen here, cheaply, against the wall, so he carried her to the bed and dropped her onto the sagging mattress. He gave up on the bodice of her dress, content to feel the shape of her breasts through the fabric, and moved his hand down to the skirt, which he raised along her warm thighs. She lifted her hips to help him get her underwear off. He unzipped his pants, then shifted, awkwardly tugging to pull his wallet out of his pocket. When it was free he opened it with one hand and looked for a condom he knew was in there, but a light scrape of her teeth on his earlobe made him fumble. The wallet fell to the floor. “It’s all right,” Mariam said, holding him back. She reached into his pants, and he kissed her gratefully.
She flinched a little when he slipped his hand between her legs. As soon as she whispered something into his ear, a lewd and unmistakable command, he lowered his pants and entered her, full of awe and disbelief, as if he hadn’t expected all of their fondling to lead to this. They made love slowly and silently, taking up enough space to fill a coffin. She took his collar into her mouth, biting it, salivating on it. Just watching her suck on his collar made him want to explode. Finally she let it go. She found his tongue and he felt her rise and break, her eyes squeezed shut, her whole body tightening. He was so struck by her climax that he came inside her without warning and fell over her like a heavy drape. She held his head against her chest, their hearts beating discordantly until their pulses settled.
After a while he became conscious of her captivity. With some effort he rolled off her, immediately bristling at the withdrawal of heat and flesh, her sudden absence. He got on his back and let the breeze cool his face. She slipped her hand into his.
When he woke up, it was not dawn yet and Mariam was lying next to him, curled up on her side with her back to him. Here they were again, waking up after a brief slumber, but they were more clothed this time, more heavily armored. They’d gotten the sex out of the way but the sex hadn’t settled anything. He could finally see the zipper running down the back of her dress. He tugged on the metal tab.
“If I knew you were coming I’d have worn a different dress.”
“How do you get this blasted thing off?”
It took both of his hands but he finally got it. Once the zipper gave way the dress opened, down to the small of her back. He ran his fingers down her spine. He unclasped her bra and watched her slip out of it while he took off his own clothes, his constrictive shirt, his undershirt, his long unzipped pants and his cotton shorts, his stupid socks, until he was naked and unfettered, and Mariam was almost there, except for the dress which still clung to her hips. She turned onto her back to get a full look at him. Her final disrobing, a slow slinking exit from that blue yoke, was so captivating he didn’t dare reach down to help her. “We don’t know each other anymore,” she whispered.
“We know each other a little,” he said. This time, they weren’t concerned with being quiet. The bed creaked and hammered the wall.
When the sun was up, they got dressed and snuck out of the house, moving apprehensively out into the world, distrusting its ability to give them the sustenance they needed. Coffee and breakfast brought them slowly closer to the reality of their surroundings. She cheerfully confessed she had forgotten to put on her underwear, and fidgeted quietly while he smoked a cigarette.
Back in his room, they stared at a pile of papers he had stacked on a desk.
“I have to go,” she said. “My mother will need me, and you have work to do.”
He sat on a rickety wooden chair as she searched for her underwear. She found it in the bed and made a show of putting it on, lifting her skirt as she slipped it up her thighs. When she was finished she smoothed down her skirt, grinning at her bawdy performance.
“It’s a strip tease in reverse,” she explained. “I wish I had a sweater.”
He stared at her in wonder. She moved restlessly under his gaze, running her fingers through the tangles in her hair, waiting for him to say something, to get up and walk her out, to look away.
“Do you still have the letter you wrote to the pub?” he said. He didn’t know why he had a sudden longing to read it, to hear the voice of the girl he used to know.
She laughed. “I have it but you’ll never see it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s horrible. It’s pathetic. Pages of me begging you to love me.”
The mood changed. They were back again in that place, where she had thought herself unloved. It was time for him to correct her old perceptions. He leaned forward, signaling to her that he had something important to say. She noticed and sat down on the side of the bed, prepared to stay and listen. He had not expected to want to tell her all this so soon, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving already.
“That night that I called you from the pub,” he said, “We had abandoned our posts. When we were caught, I was given a new posting in Menud Fort. Do you know about Menud Fort?”
“I’ve heard of it,” she said.
“It’s a military prison. I did transport runs delivering men from the checkpoints to the prison. Sometimes I didn’t even get out of the truck. The checkpoint guards loaded them into the back and the ones at the gate took them out. Do you see what I’m trying to say?”
She said, “You were given a job and you did it.”
“I wanted to get out of there. So that I could put it behind me and come see you. I thought about you, all the time.”
She nodded, seeing that he was getting off track. “What happened there, John?”
He described it as if he had memorized a script, listening dispassionately to his own voice while trying not to see the things he described. In that way, the right words came out in the right order. “One day I pulled up to the checkpoint. The checkpoint guards were jumpy. They had a prisoner who was barely conscious, and past the checkpoint, there was a car with its doors open.” He was trying to explain to Mariam that nothing had seemed right, even with everything he had come to accept about that place. The whole scene was charged with something that compelled him to get out of the truck and see if the car was empty. “There was a little girl, no more than six,” he said, “shot in the chest. She had tiny fingernails with pink nail polish. Her mother, in the front seat, was pregnant. They were on the road to the hospital and it was possible she had been in labor.”
He had not looked away from Mariam, forcing himself to watch her reactions. She listened, steadily holding his gaze, as if she had been trained to hear confessions like this. Her eyes were warm and full of compassion.
“Do you want to know all of it, Mariam?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I went back to the truck. The prisoner had been loaded into the back and I drove off. In a few minutes, he started shouting, kicking and pounding his fists, and I could hear that he wasn’t shackled.” That one detail, the missing metallic sounds of a prisoner’s chains, caused her brow to furrow. But she recovered and he went on. “I stopped the truck and opened the back. As soon as I opened the door, he knocked me off my feet. He put his hands on my neck and there was a struggle.”
She waited. For the first time, she averted her eyes. “Did he make it?” she asked calmly.
He told her what he knew, that he’d hit the man’s head against the bumper until it bled into the sand, until he stopped moving. “Then I put him back into the truck and took him to the gate.”
He felt he had told her enough. This was who he was. It would never leave him. For the rest of his life he wanted it to be a secret only Mariam knew. She was free now to decide if she wanted that burden.
“You’ve suffered with such terrible memories,” she said. “I don’t blame you for not telling me then.”
She didn’t say why. If she thought she would have judged him, he was certain she wouldn’t have. She would have tried to soothe him, and he had not wanted to be soothed.
“I want th
em to let me go,” he said. He didn’t realize he was thinking out loud until he heard her respond.
“I hope they will, John.”
Much later, she told him about a project she had worked on at the library, which required her to read thousands of pages of testimony for a war crimes tribunal. It made sense to him, then, that she had listened to his confession without flinching. While he became consumed with a discipline in which human history mattered as much as a handful of sand, she had spent hours alone in a locked room, reading stories that gave her nightmares. He couldn’t really understand why she would want to submerge herself in a sea of brutality, but this is where they met again, both acquainted in their own way with the horrors of the world. Before she left him that afternoon, in their first twenty-four hours together, they had gotten that out of the way. He could be happy again, thinking of all the peace and beauty to come.
SEVEN
It was raining. Mariam stood by the window facing the canal, and John sat next to her, in his lonely chair, leaning over with his forehead on her hip. He wanted to make love to her with the windows open, with the sound and smell of the rain coming in, and if he was persistent enough she would probably give in, but then the whole cycle would start again. It was easy for them to be similarly reckless their first night together, in his room at the boarding-house, but in the following days, their togetherness still confined to this room, they proved to be similarly practical. Mariam wanted to get on a contraceptive pill, after she was sure she wasn’t pregnant. It would take two weeks for her to be certain, a long time in a short summer, but John agreed it would be a mistake for her to get pregnant. He said he was sorry he hadn’t been more careful. He had thought, when she told him not to look for the condom, that she was already protected. The truth was that she didn’t want him to use a condom with her, not then or now, that it made her feel insecure in a way she didn’t want to admit.
In a way they needed two weeks of abstinence. They had been apart for eight years, the last three a complete mystery. There was so much to fill in. She didn’t even know where he lived now, and was surprised to hear that he lived in an apartment that belonged to his family, on a quiet street close to the garden district of Alexandria. He told her he had a friend staying there for the summer. “You know him from Mount Belet, in fact, or at least, he knows who you are.”
She couldn’t think of anyone it could be.
“Vic Arora,” he said. “Do you remember ever meeting him?”
“Oh,” she said, feeling ill, “I do remember him.”
“He wouldn’t tell me what happened with you.”
“Nothing happened,” she said quietly. “He made me sad. He seemed so uncomfortable.”
John understood. “He was strange then, but he’s grown into himself. He wasn’t comfortable being eighteen.”
“We spent a little time together,” Mariam said. “Maybe an hour or two.”
John frowned. “Did he hurt you?”
“No. He didn’t hurt me. I wasn’t afraid of him. Maybe I should have been but I wasn’t.”
John told her how he’d run into him a few years ago and had been moved enough by his ordeal to help him. When he talked about Vic she felt she learned something important about both men, and about the world of men, which was so alien to her. She learned that Vic had more courage than anyone knew, and that John wanted to reward him for it, even if no one else did. She felt tearful listening to John talk about Vic, his friend that he spoke of more lovingly than he had of anyone else in Alexandria, even his parents or sisters. About his parents and sisters John spoke with great affection and mild irritation, but not admiration, not reverence, not even the kind of familial devotion that he had for Vic. She realized she would be safe with John if he loved her. How would he sound, talking about Mariam to Vic? Would Vic come to admire her, simply from the way John told her story?
When she wasn’t with him, she was constantly distracted. She evaluated all of their interactions, cataloguing her shifting feelings of security and insecurity. She inserted herself into her idea of his life in Alexandria, trying to envision a future with him. Most of all, she could not forget his story of the murdered family in Menud Fort. A curiosity about them kept resurfacing. She believed John had told her everything he could, everything that he knew and could face, and still she wanted more. She didn’t know where this desire came from, if it was habit from working on the war archives, or if there was a greater purpose to it besides a satisfaction of her own curiosity. She kept forcing it down, and it kept floating back up. She didn’t want to cause him more pain, but the girl whose fingernails were pink, the mother who was in labor, and the father who had fought John in the sand—all of them had names.
He came to meet her parents after she started taking a contraception pill. She didn’t want a fear of pregnancy to be on their minds, and they needed some time to come together, to shed some of their separateness. As a unit they presented themselves first to his unpleasant landlady, and then to Malick, and to Misha and the others at the library when John came to look at maps and read journals and allegedly work on his dissertation in a study room.
She was nervous, of course, about what he would think of her home and her parents. She timed it so that he would arrive during her father’s afternoon nap. She didn’t want John to be overwhelmed by both of them at once, by her mother’s curiosity and her father’s confusion. This was a good decision for she had not quite prepared him for her mother. Her beauty startled him, and Mariam had forgotten how it was for people when they first met her mother. No one could reconcile the outward glamour of her appearance, those striking eyes and high cheekbones, with the drudgery of her circumstances.
Her mother was also awkward, frazzled and absent-minded. Mariam had never brought a man home before, and certainly her mother had not expected this one, the one whose letters had stopped so brutally. It was two in the afternoon and she began to open a bottle of wine John had brought for dinner. “Mama, not now,” Mariam said. She took the bottle away and ordered her to make a pot of tea instead. Once the tea was set, Mariam cut a plum cake and they sat down. John and Mariam sat next to each other, facing her mother’s interrogation from the other side of the table.
“How are you finding English Canal?” she asked John. “It must feel very small after Alexandria.”
“It’s charming,” John said. He looked at Mariam. “It’s very charming.”
“Mariam tells me you’re working with Dr. Malick. She doesn’t remember, of course, but her father used to know him.”
“Malick mentioned that,” John said. “They worked on the highway project.”
“And you’re writing your dissertation,” Mama said with forced enthusiasm. “What is the topic?”
John and Mariam began to laugh. It had taken him many attempts before he could explain his dissertation to Mariam in a language she could understand. The basic idea was simple enough, but his execution of the idea was so complex he’d lost sight of the simplicity of it. Poor Mama looked back and forth between them, waiting painfully. Mariam could see he lacked the confidence to explain it again now, and decided to rescue him.
“I think it’s like this, Mama. The bedrock of Alexandria and the central metropolitan region was formed beneath an ancient mountain range that was once as high as the Himalayas. John is studying the characteristics of the rock, and from the amount of heat and pressure that would have been required to form it he can figure out what this range looked like, what the highest and lowest peaks were, things like that.”
“How interesting,” her mother said. She turned to John and asked him, “Did Mariam represent it correctly?”
“She has stated it perfectly,” John answered.
“Mariam understands a great many things that I don’t. This has some modern application, I imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there is a compelling reason to know
about this mountain range?”
“Not really,” he said cheerfully.
“It certainly reminds us of the impermanence of things,” she offered.
John and Mariam nodded in silent agreement and her mother sighed. “It’s time to wake my husband from his nap. Why don’t you two take a walk along the canal?”
“I thought I’d show John the house first,” Mariam said, but Mama looked stricken. “The house?”
“Just upstairs,” she said. She felt like a little girl, wanting to show her room to a new friend. Mama was relieved and excused herself, disappearing to the back of the house while Mariam took John out of the kitchen. They breezed through the living room and she pulled him up the stairs, but he kept stopping to look at the photographs that hung on the wall, pictures of Mariam during various stages of her childhood, including some awkward ones she tried to cover with her hand. When she begged him not to look, he took hold of her and lifted her away from the wall, pretending to look at all of the pictures as he carried her thrashing and squealing to the landing. They tumbled into her room, the door slamming shut behind them, and they devoured each other on the floor like mute savages. It was over in a few thrilling minutes. They were safe now, protected from the tyrannous biology of reproduction.
As soon as he recovered he was up walking around the room, endearingly curious about her possessions, riffling through the jewelry box on top of her bureau and picking up the book on her bedside table. “Les Fleurs du Mal,” he said.
“I’m trying to keep up my French,” she said. “The only time I get to read is when I’m going to bed, and invariably I fall asleep. I think now my brain associates French with sleep.”
“We read a lot of geological texts in German.”