The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

John shrugged. “I guess we’ll take it. You’re sure we can afford it?” he asked Vic.

  “The rent’s so cheap, you’ll laugh,” Vic said. Mariam left it to John to go upstairs and talk to the building manager. She wanted to stay and look out the window of her new apartment.

  Afterwards they went to Vic’s apartment for coffee and biscuits. He had never had his own home before and Mariam could tell how much it pleased him to have them over. He had arranged it beautifully, all of the furniture configured exactingly. His living room was a perfectly ordered home library, and Mariam was content to browse through his books while John and Vic talked about the department meeting on Monday. The department had been reorganized. Instead of a department chair, a committee of faculty and doctoral students would run it collaboratively. Vic said John would fall in love with this model of collective leadership, but John was skeptical.

  Mariam tuned out of their argument as she examined Vic’s library, proceeding slowly along the wall of bookshelves. His collection fascinated her. In addition to the science texts, there was an entire case of books on history, politics, and economics, including the three volumes of Marx’s Capital in the original German, and several works by Lenin, translated from Russian, and other books on similar themes. She knew some people collected a certain kind of book, almost out of an aesthetic sensibility rather than a genuine interest in its content. Mariam herself had never collected much of anything. She always got her books from the library and the ones she loved somehow stayed with her without becoming a weight to be carried from one place to another. She of course loved the French classics but had also developed a taste for reading expansive explorations of science and history. She would easily put John’s manuscript in that category. Geology, being a descriptive science, seemed as poetic to Mariam as it was empirical, and John somehow had been gifted with a poetic mind. She envied him sometimes; his abilities were so varied and fluid.

  “Have you read all these books, Vic?” Mariam asked, holding The State and Revolution in her hand. He was in the middle of an important point and she had interrupted. He looked up, disoriented, and said he had a lot of time to read the last time he was in the hospital, and before when he was in prison. “Did you know about that, Mariam?” he asked, meaning his prison term.

  She had known. John told her many years ago, but she must have forgotten. Vic went back to his conversation with John, and Mariam went back to her silence, thinking everyone around her had come so far. John, her father, and now Vic, but unlike her father and her husband, Vic had done it alone, with no woman to take care of him, needing only his singular focus and determination. Lately, or perhaps always, these were the things she lacked, focus and determination. Her attention was unsteady and John could redirect it easily. She looked again at Vic’s library and thought of her grandfather, whose story she abandoned. She wished she could have grown up in one of those multigenerational homes where stories were passed down, where no other effort was required to know exactly who you were.

  Monday came. As John got ready for his meeting, he asked Mariam what she was going to do with her day. She told him she would spend time with her mother, and perhaps take her father for a walk along the canal. While she did do both those things after John left for his meeting, around midmorning she took the tram to the university. The tram ride made her feel ill, like she was falling backwards and never landing. She got off as soon as she could and walked the rest of the way to College Street. The old cafés were still there, and the booksellers, but overall the street looked more glassy and modern. There was a new pharmacy, brightly lit and clean. She hurried into the feminine aisle and examined the pregnancy testing kits, which were all priced extravagantly, but she was afraid to choose any but the most expensive one. She hid her purchase at the bottom of her handbag and escaped the pharmacy.

  Around the corner, on the sidewall of the building, Mariam stopped to read a message written in graffiti: Governments should be afraid of their people. The letters were a shocking red, with a patchwork of white paint in varying shades around them. Her first instinct was to agree, but she changed her mind. She wanted to say the relationship between a government and its people should not be fearful in either direction, though that was not very pithy and would not have fit on the wall.

  She kept walking toward the campus, steering clear of the science building where John was in his meeting. She arrived at the library and stopped to admire its somber elegance, taking a deep breath before she stepped into the cool marble lobby. Once inside, she felt immediately at home. She settled on the things that had not changed, the brass sconces and old wooden study carrels, and tried to ignore the boxy gray computers littering the counter. She went to the reference floor and ran straight into Misha. Misha saw her, froze and blinked. “Mariam? What on earth are you doing here?”

  Mariam smiled. As soon as Misha recognized her and spoke with her typical candor, it was as if no time had passed. Misha kissed both her cheeks and led her to an office with a window facing the lawn. “I’m head of research now. It’s good that you left. It eliminated my competition.” Misha pulled a chair out for Mariam and sat regally behind her wide desk. She showed Mariam a picture of her family, a husband whose marriage proposal she’d declined four times before she finally gave in and three children, twin girls and a boy. It was a studio portrait. They all wore the same shade of blue and looked happy enough.

  “They’re beautiful,” Mariam said.

  “What about you? Any children?”

  “No,” Mariam said.

  “When you left I didn’t think we’d ever see you again. I thought you’d be living somewhere exotic.”

  “John got an appointment here. I’ll be close to my parents.”

  “Still, you must have been all over the world by now.” Misha was smiling at her with an endearing, dreamy pride, and Mariam lifted her shoulders, a gesture for Misha to take in any way she liked. Misha was still smiling happily, and Mariam left it at that. She didn’t want to talk about her passport. The subject bored her, and Mariam had come for a different purpose.

  “Has the library been all right?” Mariam asked. “Has it been busy?”

  “We’re awfully busy, though I can’t guess why. The students are always demonstrating. I don’t know how they have time to study.”

  “Do you have enough people on the reference floor?”

  Misha became suspicious, and leaned back in her chair. “Are you trying to get a job?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “On the floor, with the younger girls?”

  “I don’t mind. I’d be grateful, Misha. My husband is going abroad for two weeks. I can’t just sit at home waiting for him to come back.”

  Misha was amused. “Your husband. It sounds so funny to hear you say that. How is he? Are your lunches with him as exciting as they used to be?”

  Mariam blushed.

  “In that case,” Misha said with her hand on her heart, “You must come and work here. There will be no waiting idly for husbands on my watch.”

  Misha made the call to the main floor right away, and sent Mariam to fill out the proper papers. On her way out, feeling a mad rush of optimism, she slipped into a restroom meant for the female employees and opened the box she bought at the pharmacy. The directions were simple; the answer came quickly. She was pregnant. Clearly, heavily, virulently pregnant.

  She wouldn’t tell anyone yet. Not her mother. Not John. For a little while she wanted to be alone with her happiness, and she wanted John to go to his conference unburdened. Later that day, as she told him about the job, she realized that was all the news he needed. He was relieved; she would have something to keep her busy while he was away. He seemed very much unburdened.

  Mariam insisted on moving into the apartment that week. There wouldn’t be time when he got back, with the fall term starting, and she wanted to settle in with him for a few days before he left. It occurred to h
er that she was acting strangely. John seemed confused by her demands. He kept asking if she’d be all right in the apartment by herself, since she’d never lived on her own before.

  “I won’t be living on my own,” she teased. “You are coming back, aren’t you?” He smiled weakly and she teased him more, thrilled by his minor suffering.

  The night before he left, she shoved her bloated body into the cheapest red lace lingerie she could find at the store. She examined herself in the mirror and decided she looked all right, just a little fleshy. He had been staring curiously at her breasts for days, but if he came to any conclusions about them he didn’t say anything. She looked in the mirror and told herself she was ravishing. He would be waiting.

  When she presented herself to him he looked at her body as if it were entirely new. “Oh my God,” he said, in a tone more appropriate for a train wreck than a woman in lingerie, and she wriggled self-consciously until he pulled her toward the bed by her wrist and set his lips on her breasts. He pushed the lace of her bra away and sucked on her nipples before she pushed him off and stepped away, covering herself with the lace again. “Don’t you want to just look for a minute?”

  He smiled. “I’m looking.”

  She didn’t know what to do next. She turned and tugged at the waistband of her panties and acted like she was going to touch herself. She stopped awkwardly when his expression shifted from amusement to pity.

  “Turn around,” he said. “Get on your hands and knees.”

  She turned around and lowered herself to her hands and knees, crawling a few inches and looking back. She took it as a good sign that his neck looked so taut. She slunk back to him, like a prowling cat, and when she reached him she put her tongue on his leg just below his knees. She grazed his thigh with her knuckles and slipped her hand through his boxer shorts and her tongue kept creeping and creeping up. Obediently he kept his hands to himself, waiting until his cock was in her mouth to grab hold of her head. He moaned and cried her name and after not much time at all he pushed her onto the bed and pulled her panties down just far enough to slip inside her and come.

  All at once she began to sob. He lifted his head, alarmed, and gathered her up into his arms. “No, no, don’t cry,” he begged. She turned away from him, but she guided his arm as she turned and held onto it like an iron bar. She cried into his wrist. “We’ll have everything we want,” he said. “Soon, Mariam. I promise.”

  It was before dawn when Malick came in a taxi to pick him up. John had mostly gotten ready while she slept. He woke her up only after he didn’t need anything more than to say goodbye. She felt like a sleepwalker, following him down the stairs. He told her to wait in the vestibule because it was cold outside, too cold for her to be standing around in her dressing gown. The overhead light in the vestibule was dim and orange, dreamlike, and through the narrow window beside the door she watched John, Malick, and the driver load the trunk of the taxi. John ran back up the path. She opened the door for him and in the doorway he pressed his lips hard against her temple before he went back down the path.

  She closed the door to keep out the chill. John disappeared inside the taxi and Malick stood outside it a moment longer, peering at the vestibule window, trying to make out Mariam’s form, and when he saw she was still there he put his hand up in the air. He held it there until she answered his gesture with her own hand against the glass. Then, briskly, he got in the taxi and allowed it to pull away.

  The women’s clinic was white from ceiling to floor, with hard white formica chairs and nurses in white uniforms. The patients looked like globs of dark paint splattered onto a blank canvas. Mariam read a magazine, looking expectantly toward the reception desk at the end of every page. It was a half hour past her appointment time. A woman had called her up to the desk earlier, looking around the lobby for a man that might belong to Mariam. “Is your husband here?” she asked.

  Mariam explained that he was away, on a business trip.

  “Is no one here with you?”

  “No.”

  “We like someone to be here with the mother. In case.”

  Mariam understood. The last time she’d had an ultrasound the news had been devastating, and John had been with her.

  “Will they not do the scan then?” Mariam asked calmly. “No one told me when I made the appointment. Otherwise I would have brought someone.”

  The woman told Mariam to have a seat and she would be called up shortly, but ages went by before someone called her name. She was led into a room, another white room with a white machine that looked like a squat robot with a small gray screen for a face. She was left alone for a few minutes to take off her pants and lie down on the exam table. Staring at the plaster ceiling, she willed herself to breathe deeply and relax.

  To her surprise, a man came in, a young man. He introduced himself as a doctor but he hardly looked old enough, and what doctor did an ultrasound himself? She breathed in and out, lifted her shirt and closed her eyes. He warned her that the paddle would feel cold at first. She flinched when it touched her skin. This was the excruciating part, the wordlessness. The punching of buttons that seemed to go on forever. As he slid the scanner and pressed it into her flesh, she wanted to ask him, “Do you see anything?” There had been no need to ask last time. She had already known her pregnancy was over.

  Finally a sound filled her ears like she had been pulled underwater, a low-pitched rhythmic grinding, a swishing like sandy water being pumped furiously though a piston. Still the doctor was silent, listening. “It’s a good, strong heartbeat,” he said softly. She lifted her hands to her face and covered her eyes. She breathed, and breathed.

  “Judging from the size of the fetus you are about fourteen weeks.”

  He was extremely professional, unmoved by the sound of the heartbeat. “I have had a miscarriage at sixteen weeks,” she confessed.

  Still occupied by the machine, he asked, “Did you have a scan before that?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “If the fetus is healthy at fourteen weeks, it’s rare to have complications at sixteen weeks. Probably it was not a healthy fetus. Did they inspect the tissue afterwards?”

  “No,” she said. It was a little rural hospital in Luling. They did ultrasounds to determine the sex of the baby and the due date and had little interest in dead fetal tissue.

  He moved away from the screen and wrote on her chart. “You have nothing to worry about. You can come back in six weeks.” He left and sent the nurse in to tell her she was all done. They seemed to want her out of the room in a hurry.

  She went to the tea shop and had a bowl of ice cream with a banana and melted chocolate. When the waitress slid it across the counter Mariam looked at her, beaming. “I’m celebrating,” she said, and the girl smiled politely.

  At the library she was given regular hours, Monday through Friday from eight to four. Misha found a desk in a storage room and tried to figure out where to put it. “Why don’t we leave it here?” Mariam suggested. “Under this window.” It was a high lunette, delivering sunlight in diagonal tubes toward the broken tile floor.

  “You can’t work in here,” Misha argued. “It’s horrible.”

  “I can work anywhere,” Mariam said. She did not like all the trouble she had caused with her sudden hiring. “I’ll hardly be in here anyway.”

  “I remember this about you,” Misha said. “You were always so agreeable.”

  During the first week she mostly handled maps and microform and sat at her desk only to eat lunch. The work was easy but absorbing and the days went by quickly. If she spent a lot of time with microform she went outside afterwards, to clear the smell of acetate from her head. After a few days she asked Misha if she could avoid the microform room, saying it gave her a headache, and Misha was immediately suspicious.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  Mariam didn’t want to deny it. Withholding
was one thing but denying it, negating the existence of the fetus was another thing altogether and it made Mariam superstitious, and if she lied to Misha only to have to tell her the truth in a few weeks when her pregnancy became more apparent, she feared Misha would feel slighted. At any rate Mariam hesitated too long and Misha let out a little squeal of delight. “Don’t tell anyone,” Mariam whispered. “John doesn’t even know yet.”

  Misha pressed her lips together and crossed them with her finger, but she still looked like she was going to burst.

  On her first weekend alone Mariam decided to unpack the rest of the kitchen and bake cakes. A walnut cake for her parents, chocolate for Vic, and a lemon cake for the other neighbor who shared their floor, a woman named Dolly whom they had met briefly in the corridor before John left.

  Whenever John called from America, their conversations were hurried and awkward. She couldn’t hear him well and he never told her anything of consequence, except once after he had seen his family. His parents and sisters had all come down to Washington to spend a few days with him and reportedly sent her their love, which was one of those meaningless phrases she never believed or understood. They had loved her once, she knew, but what reason had they to love her now? She had kept him away from them for so long.

  After his calls she always had trouble falling asleep, afraid of one thing after another. She was simultaneously afraid of losing her baby and having her baby. She was afraid of being childless, and afraid of spending the rest of her life in the service of a dream. At times she felt that’s all children were, dream vessels holding the promise of something better. In their children, parents could cultivate all the strengths they’d given up in themselves. Their hearts would be kinder. Their minds would be steadier. They would know more, understand more, feel more deeply; they would be saviors.

  She stayed awake formulating theories about procreation. She believed women and men had children for different reasons. Women with a boundless supply of love and deflated sense of importance needed outlets for their affection, a chance to nurture someone they perceived as more essential. Men had children to extend their own lives, to have their own efforts carried forth and their failures rectified. Yes, she had settled upon this before drifting off to sleep; a child was a man’s legacy and a woman’s eclipse.