by Chaitali Sen
He brushed a wisp of hair away from her face. “Mariam, there may not be a solution inside the system. Have you considered that?”
She hesitated. “I’ve considered it,” she whispered.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” A window had been opened, at least. For now he didn’t want her to worry. He would find out more. They had lived with this long enough and he was determined to find the fastest way out of it.
*
Later, as promised, Cyrus followed up on their rooftop conversation. He didn’t reveal more than he had to. He said his wife had been sponsored by relatives in Hungary and had emigrated legitimately. It was Cyrus who had no chance of leaving the country without a forged passport and visa. He didn’t say why but John had a suspicion it had to do with some political activities in his student days. John had overheard veiled references to some troubles he’d had in the past, and he’d begun to notice how many of the department’s unconventional attitudes were led by Cyrus. In contrast, John didn’t hold back anything about Mariam’s history. He told him all the reasons they needed to have an alternative plan.
Then Cyrus told him about a father and son who forged documents, but he cautioned John not to go to them unless he was sure. Once he was sure, things could proceed quickly, but they were the best and they weren’t cheap, and they didn’t like their time to be wasted. John said he wouldn’t be ready for a while. First, he needed to talk it out with Mariam, and he wanted to wait until their daughter was born and able to handle the journey. He imagined it would be six months at least before he could reasonably commit.
But in his mind, he’d already made his decision. This was the way forward. And he would not do it Cyrus’s way, enduring a long separation from his wife and child. John had his own plan. He and Mariam and Sara would all travel with forged documents. It was important to stay together, and it was even more important for them to travel as equals. The importance of equal status had been fixed in his mind for some time. He was beginning to realize how much it wore on them, the inequality, the immobility of one person juxtaposed against the mobility of the other. They either all needed legal documents or they all needed false ones.
He told Mariam about the father and son, asking her to keep her mind open. She had questions, many questions he couldn’t answer yet. She said they would know how good the papers were only after Cyrus made it safely to Budapest. John had to admit that was true. He had no idea when Cyrus was planning to leave.
She didn’t quite understand the part about equal status. He was having trouble explaining why he wanted forged documents for all of them. How would he work without legal papers? How would he get an academic position? Her questions were making him tired. “One thing at a time,” he begged.
Mariam became distracted and stopped interrogating him. “She’s kicking like crazy.”
“She can’t wait to come out,” he said. “All we have to do now is get ready for her.” Their baby would be here soon, and after, whatever had to be done would be done together.
THIRTEEN
Mariam’s water broke in her mother’s kitchen, a few days earlier than expected. Arifah called John in a panic, just as he was leaving his office to teach his research seminar, and asked if they should wait for him to arrive. “Can you take her to the hospital? Can you get a taxi?” he asked, in a panic himself. Arifah assured him she could, and after he told his students his baby was coming and received their congratulations, he went to the hospital. He got there before them and waited anxiously, wondering if it would have been better to have picked her up in the car, but in a few minutes he saw them pull in. He helped Mariam out of the taxi and into the hospital. Under her wool coat she still wore her nightgown. Her feet were in fuzzy pink slippers.
If she was in a lot of pain she bore it stoically. She stared and nodded at the doctor in utter obedience as she held on tightly to John’s hand. The doctor and nurses came in and out, checking her dilation, taking her pulse, offering water, making small talk. Arifah stayed as long as she could. Before she left she kissed Mariam’s forehead and said her labor took only three hours. The nurses were impressed, and Mariam was happy, taking Arifah’s final pronouncement as an edict.
But the labor was long and brutal, and loud, and at the end of it, hours later, was a silence that wouldn’t cease. The doctor held their baby awkwardly. She was a good size, well proportioned, with all the expected wrinkles and folds, exquisite in every way except that she was inanimate, and not the right color, and not a sound came out of her. Mariam couldn’t see her and waited, smiling, and John had to look away. He had never seen anything as heartbreakingly beautiful as that, Mariam slick and weary from her labor with her fading smile and stubborn hope.
The nurse carried their baby out and the doctor gestured for John to follow him into the hallway. Thinking back on it he couldn’t imagine what Mariam must have thought, left suddenly alone. “Something went wrong,” the doctor said. “Sometimes these things happen. Will you tell her or would you like me to do it?”
John heard himself say, in reaction to the doctor’s clipped tone, that he would tell her. He went back into the room and walked slowly to her side. She was staring at the ceiling, the first signs of despair in her unflinching eyes.
“Where is she?”
He took her hand weakly. Her fingers were cold. “Mariam,” he said, and stopped. He had no language to continue and his mind was a black void.
Two nurses came back in. One of them, the delivery nurse, held a bundle as stiff as a loaf of bread, which was supposed to be their daughter. The other nurse prepared an injection, a sedative for Mariam. The one with the bundle nudged him out of the way and tried to get Mariam to take her, to hold her baby and say goodbye, but Mariam, giving her an imperceptible glance, said that wasn’t her baby. She was quiet, polite, but her terror pounded the walls, and when the nurse tried again Mariam cried out and pushed her away. The woman reeled back, clutching the baby close to her chest as if dropping her would matter.
Mariam turned to John, her mouth twisted and scowling. “They took our baby. Go find her.”
He looked pleadingly at the nurse with the needle in her hand. “For God’s sake, what are you waiting for?” Mariam followed his gaze and saw the needle and pulled her arms in close to her body. She looked at John like he was some kind of demon, and screamed.
“Hold her down,” the nurse ordered. He put his hand on her forehead, pressing her head against the pillow. He put his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming, and after a while, overpowered, he felt Mariam’s neck relax and her head sink back into the pillow, all the tension under his palms withering. The nurse quickly plunged the needle into a blue vein and said, “There’s a good girl.”
He was left alone with her for a while. They brought him a chair, in which he sat staring at the wall, occasionally glancing at Mariam to make sure she was really sleeping. At least in her dreams, he hoped, there was a chance she could do all the things she imagined, holding, nursing, cooing, kissing her baby. It would be better if she stayed there, he thought. It would be better if she never woke up.
The nurse with the bundle came back. “One of you has to hold her.” He put his arms out and let her hand him his baby. He moved the blanket away and saw her face, her wrinkled eyes that had perhaps never opened, and short and straight black lashes. He felt her silky hair and kissed her cold blue cheek. Her hands were little balled fists. Her name was Sara and she was a corpse. He wept over her for a few minutes until the nurse took her away.
Mariam needed to be washed up and he remembered they’d left Arifah in the waiting room hours ago. He found her there, sitting with her head in her hands, her shoulders heaving violently. Someone, perhaps the doctor, had given her the news. One of the nurses saw him standing against the wall and gestured toward Arifah, a gesture that said he ought to do something, to get her out of here. She was upsetting the others who were waiting, now capti
ves to her grief. Everyone was staring at Arifah, no one daring to speak, until a woman went over and put an arm around her. Arifah lifted her head and cried, “The water is poisoned. I told my husband we should never go back.”
The woman was kind, holding Arifah and listening. He watched them for a while before he approached, nodding gratefully to the woman, who looked at him with great pity and went back to her seat.
Arifah straightened up when she saw him. “I want to see her,” she whispered.
“They’re cleaning her up,” he said, and it sounded terribly harsh, as if he had thought Mariam to be filthy. Polluted. Arifah wiped her face with a handkerchief and after a few minutes he took her back to the room. They sat there silently, waiting for Mariam to wake up.
He didn’t know how long her eyes were open before he noticed them. She was perfectly still. John touched her cheek but she kept her eyes on the wall and asked for her mother. “I’m here,” Arifah said, and he left them alone. In a half-hour the man who handled the burial arrangements would come and John waited outside his office, wanting it to be done.
For the next two months they moved around the apartment like chess pieces. They did speak to each other, even about their baby, what had happened to her, what the doctor said, why Mariam never held her, but they weren’t communicating so much as delivering lines from a script. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs didn’t work. She was asphyxiated. He could almost see the words written out for him. They slept next to each other without touching.
It went on like this until a day Mariam sat on the edge of the bed watching him get dressed. He felt self-conscious, his movements being followed too closely, and he imagined himself saying something she might have wanted to hear, that everything would be all right. They were walking blindly through a fog of grief but surely one day soon the fog would lift.
“I’ve decided to go back to work,” she said.
“That’s wonderful,” John said with undisguised relief. The hardest part for him had been watching her give in to this relentless indolence. For the first few weeks he had to carry her into the bathtub to bathe her. He wondered guiltily how she would manage to get herself dressed and ready for work, but he hoped necessity would force her back into a proper routine.
She looked like she wanted to say something else, but her lips remained parted and unmoving. He stood in front of her and waited.
“I think it’s time for you to start over somewhere else,” she said.
“In what sense?” he asked. It was a reflexive question, something he asked his students or colleagues when he needed some time.
“I think you know.”
“Are you kicking me out of the country, Mariam?” He laughed, but she didn’t react. “And what am I supposed to do? Forget that I have a wife here?”
She stared at him impassively. “Why not? You’ve done it before.”
It took him some time to understand her intent. It wasn’t an accusation. An accusation would have implied a measure of uncertainty. Mariam had already collected the evidence and was handing down her sentence, and he stood in front of her exposed, shamed and utterly despised. This woman couldn’t be Mariam. There was no forgiveness, no warmth. He thought he had gotten away with something and her sole desire now was to show him that he hadn’t. She was someone who had been pretending to love him, but she must have stopped loving him many months ago.
“You’ve been waiting a long time to say that,” he said.
“No. It just came to me now.”
That was a lie and it enraged him. “If there’s something you want to know, Mariam, just ask me.”
“If there’s something you want to tell me, just say it.”
He stopped himself from saying something he would regret. “We have to talk about this later. We can’t possibly make any decisions now. Not after what we’ve been through.”
“But you did do something,” she cried. In an instant, all of her steely composure fell away. She was herself again, vulnerable. “You forgot me.”
Surely this was not what she needed to talk about. They had other things they needed to talk about, not this. He shook his head. “I didn’t forget you. I tried to forget you, and I made a mistake. That’s all.”
She pretended to find this amusing. He didn’t blame her. It was a ridiculous defense. “Did you try every night? Was she someone you can try again next time?” He could see now what had happened. Mariam had spent her pregnancy imagining the details he had not provided himself. Now she was a breaking dam. She held her stomach and cried, and he couldn’t help but think how their baby had been in that body full of pain. He couldn’t move closer to her, he couldn’t touch her. There was a barrier between them he couldn’t cross. He stayed where he was and waited until she could speak again. “I don’t have anything else to give you, John. Everything I wanted to give you is dead. I don’t have anything else.”
When she put it that way, with such weary defeatism, he realized his will to go on was not as strong as her will to give up. There was no fight left in him after all. “Maybe you’re right, Mariam. Maybe it’s time.”
Suddenly she relaxed. Her head fell forward, her shoulders slouched, her spine curved. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Her apparent relief was more revealing than anything she’d said that morning. “It isn’t a failure, John. It’s just time.”
He knew everything was lost now. He had always kept his gaze on something ahead, something they could run for, but now the road was at its end. In front of them was something impenetrable, and neither of them had the strength to climb it.
After that morning they settled into a strange, new domesticity. Their future had been decided in that brief exchange. She offered to go back to her parents’ house but he asked her to stay. He didn’t want anyone to know they were separating until it was already done and he was out of the country. They continued to share the same space inside their apartment, but it was like sharing an office, or sharing a room as siblings. If he was ever tempted to touch her he held back, knowing how awkward it would make their new arrangement. She continued to organize his life, which he continued to appreciate. She did everything she could to help him figure out a plan, and sometimes she described his future to him so enthusiastically he could hardly wait to leave her behind and get started.
They were prepared for it to take some time, a year or more, but there was a wealth of opportunity and everything happened faster than he expected. Before long he got a call from a department in Michigan. They conducted their interview over the telephone and made an offer. As long as he got his visa in time, he could begin in the fall semester.
Mariam said she was impressed and happy for him. She asked about this place, Michigan, if it was beautiful there, and he said no, it didn’t seem to be particularly beautiful. He thought it would be all right, just then, to brush a wisp of hair away from her eyes. She seemed surprised by his hand. She turned her head to let his thumb reach her lips. Nothing could have felt more illicit than that turn of her head. She must have realized at the same time he did that their restraint had been a kind of grief-driven madness. But there was also madness in this, in the way she wanted to be broken. She brought him to the floor and turned her back to him. She wanted to be penetrated but not inseminated. Her body was pressed against the floor. She used his forearm to protect her face from the tile. She bit his wrist and dug her nails into his palm.
When it was over, they cleaned themselves up and went on as if nothing had happened, but after the sun went down, when they were in bed and shrouded in darkness, he stroked and kissed her. He said this time he wanted her to face him. She obliged him, but she was trembling, terrified. He understood her terror. He was also afraid, entering the place where she’d birthed their daughter. She cried the whole time, even as she pulled him in. At the end she turned her head, his lips settling on her wet cheek. He felt the rise and fall of her chest against his own and he wante
d to know what it all meant.
In the morning he found her making an omelet in the kitchen. “I think it’s all right,” she said. “As long as we don’t lose our focus, I don’t see why we shouldn’t say goodbye properly.”
They spent the next few weeks saying goodbye constantly, not losing their focus but gathering momentum toward his departure. He made plans to travel to Alexandria to apply for his visa, she found out how to get a divorce, and they proceeded as if they knew exactly what needed to be done and why. He had to wonder when they had started on this path. They had come to this decision after they lost their child, but they came to it too easily. It had to have rooted itself earlier, though he couldn’t find an exact moment. Was it back in Alexandria, in the passport office? In Luling, which he thought of now as a long delusion? Here in English Canal, after he returned from his conference? He had come back from the conference changed. It was impossible not to. There he had allowed himself to acknowledge, for the first time, what he had missed in Copenhagen.
One night, he was holding Mariam, holding her tightly, listening to her heart thrumming against his ear. “You know I can’t go unless you forgive me,” he said. He was prepared to confess everything, the details of his betrayal in America, the things his parents had said, but without asking for any of those things she said she did, she forgave him and she would love him until the day she died.