by Chaitali Sen
All of her clothes began to feel tight. She spent her first paycheck on a new dress, one that was loose around her abdomen but didn’t fall like a cloak around her either. It was green, with a pretty neckline and pearl buttons. The bodice fit perfectly around her swollen breasts. She loved the changes in her body and the closer the days came to John’s homecoming the more acutely she craved him. When she closed her eyes she could almost feel his hands on her, peeling her dress away.
He was due home around midnight on Sunday. All weekend there had been a lot of noise coming through the walls, from Dolly and her teenage daughter, Zoya, from one family of rambunctious children running up and down the stairs, from visitors in and out the front door and from neighborly conversations in the hallway. All of it died down around ten o’clock and the building settled into a foreboding silence. It was past midnight when she heard the door clanging in the vestibule. She went to the top of the stairs and watched him put his suitcase down and hold onto the banister before he dared to look up. He climbed the stairs, with some effort at first, then faster until he was at the landing and she jumped into his arms. He lifted her and held her tightly, trying to remember her, she thought. She told him her news then, and he kissed her so unsteadily she was afraid they would go tumbling down the stairs.
They didn’t sleep at all that night. John washed the journey off of him and changed into his pajamas, then set himself to the task of unpacking his suitcase, destroying all evidence of his trip. He moved so frantically she couldn’t find a way to help him, and he talked on and on about the conference, in particular about his conversations with a group of geologists who had also found other evidence of asteroid impacts in Archaean rock, similar to John and Malick’s outcrop in Luling. Face to face they finally dared to discuss what had been on each of their minds, that bombardments of massive asteroids could have set off forces that accelerated the lifting of the earth’s crust and the formation of continents. Mariam tried to follow along but she was distracted by his behavior, the movement of his hands, the pitch of his voice, the rise and fall of his eyebrows. There was something childlike about his insistent storytelling, and at the same time he looked tired. Not the kind that comes from an uncomfortable passage or lack of sleep but a weariness that comes from a disappointment so shattering there is no hope of an imminent recovery. He talked without stopping, without giving her a chance to ask a question or remind him that she wasn’t able to grasp these notions of deflected plumes or shifting mantle convection patterns.
“Did you get to talk about your manuscript at all?”
“No. It didn’t come up,” he said.
She gave up then and stretched her arms above her head. “Are you hungry?”
He was frowning into his almost empty suitcase. She asked him again if he was hungry.
“I couldn’t have talked about the book,” he said. “It would have made me think about you.”
“You didn’t want to think about me?”
“I hated being away from you. I don’t think you could understand. You were home, but I felt completely adrift.”
Completely adrift. His voice was heavy with guilt and she imagined, not for the first time, what he might have done to moor himself when he was completely adrift. He was a man, after all, and weak sometimes, weaker than either of them liked to admit, and she knew how he liked to fuck.
“It was difficult for me, too, John. If I hadn’t had this,” she said, placing her hand on her belly, “I would have gone mad.” He was perhaps on the edge of a confession. She had to stop him, because she wanted to put out of her mind the things she had imagined, without having them confirmed or denied.
She reached for him. He was beyond her at first until he crouched in front of her and kissed her hand. He was re-materializing, solidifying at her feet. She was surprised all over at how deeply and broadly his crow’s feet fanned out from the corners of his eyes. He lowered his head onto her lap. His hair was still thick, but receding above his temples. One day he would be an old man, like her father, and she wondered if she would still know him then.
“Tell me about the heartbeat,” he said.
“It sounded like a pump under water. It was so fast.” She mimicked the sound for him, trying to get it right, and when she looked down again she saw that he had begun to cry. In all these years, she had never seen him with tears in his eyes, and had not thought him capable of weeping.
TWELVE
They found out they were having a girl. Mariam wanted to name her Sara. John heard the name in his head, Sara Merchant, and saw it written in a child’s scrawl. “It’s perfect,” he said. Their daughter had a name, Sara, and he hoped she would have gold specks in her eyes.
Sara was active. When Mariam felt a kick she would stop everything and cause a sudden hush. She and John would lay their palms over her taut abdomen and feel their daughter’s foot or fist moving like hard knots along that maddening barrier of skin and muscle. He would put his ear down to listen. Mariam liked to stroke his head when his ear was pressed against her, and after sinking, almost drowning in that silent intimacy, the world beyond them was monstrous.
One morning he watched Mariam get out of bed. They were both naked, for they had figured out how to make love around the intrusion of her ever-expanding womb. Mariam looked at herself in the full-length mirror. The light coming through the window was blue, and her body was shadowy in that blue light. He couldn’t believe how close he had come to making an irreparable mistake. To leaving and never seeing her like this. His family, when he saw them in America, had tried to convince him to stay. He had taken a day off from the conference to see them at a nearby motel where they had all gathered, his parents looking aged but happy, Sonia and David doting on their two children, and Theresa not a teenager anymore but a confident young woman. All they could talk about was their desire for him to join them, about how deeply they felt his absence. He sat with his parents in their depressing beige room, looking out at an ugly parking lot, and listened as they begged him to abandon his wife for a green card, as if a green card were some kind of paradise destination. There were so many women there who wanted a good husband, they said. All he had to do was choose one and learn to love her. They said they loved Mariam and they were certain she would understand. They were certain she would let him go. And after a day with them, he couldn’t quite get back to himself, and later he slept with a woman who was not Mariam, because there was nothing stopping him and he wanted to see if it would be easy.
Mariam was holding her nightgown in her arms. She unfurled it, ready to slip it on.
“Leave it,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder and dropped the nightgown to the floor. It terrified him to know how close he’d come.
A few weeks after he returned he got a call from a university press in England. They offered to publish the manuscript he had worked on in Luling. Mariam couldn’t contain her excitement when he told her the news. Only British geologists would read it, he told her. It wouldn’t even be distributed in their own country. “It won’t get you a passport,” he joked. She didn’t laugh at the joke but she wasn’t offended either. He didn’t understand, with her impending motherhood, how the book could still be important to her. To him, it felt like a relic from another lifetime.
They gave him a small load, one undergraduate class, Advanced Petrology, and a graduate seminar in research methodology. He had not been at the front of a classroom in four years, had forgotten that part of his life entirely until this new assignment forced him to remember, and when the vagueness of his memory gave him nightmares, he decided to forget again and act as if he’d never done this before. Both of the classes were small, twenty students in Petrology and eight in the seminar. The twenty in Petrology were unnaturally quiet and serious. At the same time as his Petrology class, other students conducted large and noisy protests on the common, often drowning out his lectures. His own students were already timid,
and made more timid by the shouting outside their classroom window. John asked Vic if he should expect his classes to be disrupted every day, or was this a passing phase? Vic, visibly impatient with John’s irritation, explained the situation slowly and simply. Earlier in the year students in the technical colleges and high schools north of the militarized zone had gone on a hunger strike, and a solidarity movement had spread rapidly among the students throughout the province. The demonstrators called for an opening of the militarized zone, to end what they called the occupation of the north. Vic had taught a number of students who participated in the movement and had held study groups for them outside of the regular curriculum. “Sometimes these movements begin spontaneously,” he said, “but without ideological leadership, they die out.”
John was stunned. “Don’t tell me you’ve taken it upon yourself to provide ideological leadership?”
Vic laughed, slapping John on the back. It made John feel better to know Vic wasn’t taking himself too seriously in all this. He seemed all right, in full control of his faculties.
He had trouble reconciling the image of Vic’s students with his own undergraduates, who never spoke unless they were asked a direct question, and even then never without consulting their textbooks. Whenever he tried to begin a discussion, all that came back to him was a symphony of shuffling pages. Eventually he told them to leave their books at home. He made them cut their own thin sections of rock specimens and analyze them. After a while the students found they knew more than they thought. By the time they had their first field class, they were far more lively and confident.
His graduate students in Research Methodology were older and more animated. John often lost control of the class because they were prone to argue and sometimes their arguments were more interesting than anything he had planned, but he learned how to redirect their considerable energy. Besides his two classes there were torturous department meetings run by consensus. Much of what they discussed had nothing to do with earth science. They talked about petitions, student politics, faculty politics, what to have for lunch, what to have for dinner if their meetings ran long. There were eight of them, John and Vic, two doctoral students who both looked sickly in different ways, three other unmarried or soon to be married men, and Cyrus, who was married and had a son, but his wife and son were not in the country. John was curious about Cyrus. He was a tall, bony man with narrow shoulders and a thick black mustache that overwhelmed his gaunt face. There was something haunted about him.
One day, during a break in one of their department meetings, Cyrus asked him if he wanted to go up to the roof for a cigarette. John was eager to join him, needing a cigarette badly. “For some reason,” Cyrus said, “when there are long meetings I prefer to go up instead of down.”
“Maybe it feels like more of an escape,” he said. Cyrus laughed. It was a short flight of stairs up to the roof. The breeze up there was nice, and they could see the whole lawn and all of the college buildings around it. John could see the library. “My wife works over there,” he said.
“I’ve seen her,” Cyrus said. “She’s expecting?”
“Yes,” John said, smiling. “We’re having a girl.”
Cyrus congratulated him. “I have a son. He’s in Hungary, with my wife. In Budapest.”
He lit John’s cigarette and they smoked in silence for a minute. John thought his silence was somewhat inquisitive but Cyrus did not read into it. “You must miss him,” John said at last. He didn’t mention the wife because of the varied nature of marriages, but any father would miss his child.
“Yes,” Cyrus said, “but I’ll join them soon.”
“Is it easy to get a visa to Hungary?” John asked.
Cyrus didn’t immediately answer and John stumbled. “Why Budapest, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“We know people there. Budapest was recommended.”
Their conversation halted as they finished smoking. When Cyrus looked at his watch and turned toward the door, something made John grab his wrist and stop him.
“How soon will you join them?”
“I’m waiting for some papers,” he answered.
“Papers?”
Cyrus gave a wincing smile. Clearly he didn’t want to be rude, but he was not planning to answer any more of John’s questions.
“My wife,” John said cautiously. “She can’t get a passport.” He wanted to ask Cyrus if he already knew his situation. Vic or Malick had likely told the department about it, as a way of explaining some things about his academic career and his four years in Luling. Vic certainly would not have seen a reason to keep it a secret. From his passive expression, John couldn’t tell if Cyrus knew or not. He didn’t know him well enough to read any meaning into his restrained reactions.
Cyrus nodded. “Later,” he said, and opened the door to the stairwell.
Back in their meeting, Vic made a proposal. Some students wanted to send a group of people, a delegation of sorts, into the militarized zone to meet with youth leaders on the other side. For this delegation to have maximum impact, they wanted endorsements from all of the academic departments at the college. John couldn’t believe how readily the group had taken on the proposal. Without blinking they discussed the level of support they were comfortable giving. There were two issues, whether to endorse and whether to take an active role in the campaign. It wasn’t that John didn’t see value in it, but these weren’t the discussions he’d been expecting to have at an academic institution. They would have been unheard of at Presidency, but he’d been outside the academic structure for so long, he didn’t know if times had simply changed, if this was the world now.
“You’ve been quiet,” Cyrus said. “Are you uncomfortable with the discussion?”
“No,” John lied. He remembered Malick’s mapping expedition in the north, and the story of his unfortunate friend who lost his life in the minefield. “There is a safety concern, isn’t there, in sending a delegation?”
“I would imagine,” Vic said. “That’s something they’ll have to work out in the planning.”
“I have nothing against students wanting to make a statement, but what does that have to do with our work as an academic department?”
The others seemed bored by his question. Cyrus attempted an answer. “Demilitarizing the north is essential to our discipline. We haven’t been able to gain any access to the area in decades. We can’t get a full geological picture of our own province. And we have colleagues there working under dangerous conditions. We can’t get any information to them and they can’t get it to us.”
It was a surprisingly thorough answer and John appreciated it. “What if we endorse something that causes a confrontation, and people get killed?” he asked.
“That would be terrible,” Vic agreed. “But they’re less likely to be harmed if more eyes are on them.”
In the end, the group decided to endorse the proposal but abstain from taking an active role until Vic could get more information.
John left feeling disoriented. He picked Mariam up from the library and they began to walk home. Lately Mariam preferred to walk because she found their small car too uncomfortable, and after being indoors all day she wanted fresh air and exercise. As often as he could, he tried to walk with her and continue the rest of his work from home. These walks were his only chance to relax. Once he was home he was always busy until late in the evening.
He had a lot on his mind, the talk with Cyrus and Vic’s proposal during the meeting. He only told her about the meeting, admitting to her that he had felt stupid and out of place.
“Do you think you’ll get used to the way they do things here?” Mariam asked.
“I hope so,” he said.
“It’s temporary,” Mariam said. “It is temporary, isn’t it?”
He didn’t know why she was asking in that way. “Of course it’s temporary,” he said. They had discussed it
back in Luling. They had set a deadline of two years. Within two years, there needed to be a resolution to her passport issue and he needed to apply for positions abroad, but with the pregnancy and Mariam working and John trying to adjust to his new position, they had not figured out exactly what needed to be done. And now, two years seemed a very long time to wait. He was certain Cyrus had found some way to circumnavigate the system. He needed to find out more from him.
Mariam took his hand. She wanted to stop for a minute by the canal and rest. He looked around for a place for them to sit, but there were no benches and they were almost home. She leaned against the canal wall.
“Something occurred to me the other day,” Mariam said in a hushed tone. “Our daughter will have a birth certificate. Her status can’t possibly be questioned. It will be easy to get her a passport.”
“Sure,” John said, looking uncertain. He wanted to hear what she’d been thinking, but the way she began made him apprehensive.
“Maybe you and Sara could go ahead of me,” she continued. “Do you think you could get a visa for yourself and for Sara? Your parents could take care of her for a while. They must have some mercy on a mother and child who are separated. We can get a lawyer here, who might understand the situation better.”
John stopped her. “What are you talking about? That could take years.”
It was obvious Mariam hadn’t thought through her idea. He didn’t want to upset her when all she was trying to do was have a rational discussion about their options, something they had been putting off for too long. But he felt she was on the wrong track and he had to disrupt her pattern of thought. While it was true they had not exhausted all of their legal options, there were a million things that could go wrong waiting for the government to change her status. They could make an example out of her parents. They could punish her for being the granddaughter of a political agitator. They could simply string her along without any intention of granting her citizenship. And now that they lived here, he could see how this place was constantly on the brink of turmoil. The situation was unstable at best. It was another reason he was alarmed by the rampant political discussion in their department meetings. If he and Mariam were going to be under scrutiny, he couldn’t afford to have a reputation as a troublemaker.