by Chaitali Sen
She took his hand and started up the stairs. Then she turned and faced him, her head tilted and eyebrows furrowed. “Will you forgive me for this life, John?”
He smiled. One day she would understand. He wanted nothing but this life.
PART FOUR
Sulat Province
FOURTEEN
The night he came home without Mariam, he drank half a bottle of whiskey and passed out on the couch. When he woke up his ear was throbbing. Slowly he remembered the nightmare of his waking life, Mariam being taken away, the baton swinging at his head, Vic picking him up from the courthouse and bringing him back before they could find her. He got up and wandered around the apartment, hoping irrationally that Mariam had simply returned while he slept, or better, that he’d imagined the whole thing.
Then he looked for Mariam’s things, expecting them to have vanished as well, but everything was where it should have been—her clothes, her shoes, a few books and jewelry, even the scrapbook about her grandfather, which she compulsively kept in her bedside drawer wherever she went. He hadn’t seen her with it since she’d placed it in this drawer, when they first moved into this apartment back in August. He pulled out the notebook and studied it. The front of it bubbled from papers that were slipped inside it, but more than half of its pages were compressed, flat and pristine. In the front, there were the newspaper articles. After that, some letters from Marseilles written illegibly in French, and then there was only one more item, an address scribbled on a sheet of notepaper, in the same handwriting as the letters from Marseilles, but in German. Flüchtlingszentrum, refugee center, Stuttgart.
Reluctantly he put the notebook back in the drawer. He had hoped to find something in it that could help him, but there was nothing.
He went to the bathroom to look for medicine that could kill the pain in his ear and was shocked by his deformed face in the mirror. His cheekbone was swollen and bruised, his ear-lobe bright red, and when he turned his head and painfully moved his bloodied hair, he saw a cut that was still bleeding.
He found a bottle of aspirin and slammed the door of the medicine cabinet shut. He opened it and slammed it shut again. One, two, three times it hardly made a sound over the simultaneous ringing and pounding in his ear. He pressed a wet towel over the cut on his scalp and continued to pace around the apartment. After a long time, with great dread, he went into the nursery, where he had found Mariam the previous morning.
This room had been empty since February. Mariam had not been home from the hospital a week before she said she wanted the room cleared, exorcised of baby things. It was Dolly who had taken everything out and donated it to an orphanage. Dolly had asked him secretly if he didn’t want her to simply hide some of it away, store it in her own apartment. It was her way of encouraging them to try again. He had told her he was sure they didn’t want any of it. At the time he didn’t want to imagine enduring another failed pregnancy, and even if they were to try again, he wouldn’t have wanted to pass on the things meant for another child. That was what went through his own mind but in Mariam’s mind, he had no idea if she hadn’t already decided they should separate, that any future children would be his children alone, bred by some other wife. And what she was thinking in the nursery yesterday morning, lying on the hard floor, was even more of a mystery.
He couldn’t remember if anything had been left stored in the closet, anything unrelated to the nursery. Mariam had been shedding all kinds of things, first because he was going to leave the country and she was going to go elsewhere, back to her parents presumably, and then because they were going to leave together. She had made him believe they were going to leave together. There was one strange thing she had said about suitcases. Their suitcases were so old, she remarked. The one he dragged to America, a massively awkward piece of baggage, especially was tearing at the seams and would not withstand a long journey. He thought it was strange because they were not to the point yet of worrying about suitcases. He said, “We’ll make do with what we have,” and she had not mentioned it again.
He opened the closet door. It was empty, except for the suitcase she had wanted to retire. When he tugged at the handle it should have teetered, full of air, but it fought him with its heft. He pulled it out of the closet and dropped it in the middle of the room, staring at it for a moment before he opened it and stepped back. It was full, perfectly stacked from edge to edge, with an unknown number of velo-bound booklets. He knew without looking that it was the war archives, the work that had consumed her during his military service. He pulled one out and flipped through its pages of small text. A window was cut into the plastic cover, just big enough for the title. Archived Documents of the War Crimes Commission, Volume 7. At the bottom of the title page there was a stamp. REFERENCE MATERIAL: DO NOT REMOVE: PROPERTY OF CSP LIBRARY.
He opened it and started reading. He had never asked Mariam for details about these archives, and she had never explained how truly horrendous their contents were. He read for a while but he had to stop. His head was full enough of darkness.
He threw the booklet back into the suitcase, pushed the suitcase back into the closet, and left the nursery, closing the door behind him. Then he took a shower and dressed as if it were an ordinary workday, and went out before the sun came up.
The campus was empty, the front doors of the science building chained shut, but he was able to get in through a side door with his master key. Once he was in the building he rushed up the stairs to the Geology wing and unlocked the door. The offices were dark but he didn’t turn on any lights except for his own desk lamp. On his desk there was a framed photograph he’d lost the habit of noticing. It was Mariam in Luling in front of a hill covered with yellow wildflowers. They had gone for a walk and she looked so vibrant and beautiful, her hair blowing softly in the breeze, her collared dress buttoned almost to her neckline. He had wanted to preserve their time in Luling, to preserve that morning in early spring. After he took the picture he pulled her into the grass. The sun was bright, the sky cloudless, and they had never made love in such perfect brightness before. Tiny beads of musky sweat erupted all over her skin and soaked him. They should have stayed there, in Luling, and let the world fall apart without them.
He sat at his computer and typed a letter accounting for everything that had happened the last morning he was here, when he had stood at his office window thinking about Mariam on the nursery floor and feeling sorry for himself. When he was finished he didn’t bother reading it. He sent it to the printer in the main office, which sputtered awake disastrously before it spit his paper out.
Back at his desk, he unframed the photograph of Mariam and took it to the copy machine, where he struggled for too long trying to get a decent reproduction. He tried various settings until he found one that gave him the essence of the picture, rather than a mere map of her face and its regions of light and dark. When he found the right setting he made several copies. To one he attached the letter he typed. He put the letter and the picture into the fax machine and laboriously programmed the numbers of his most important contacts abroad. With his hands shaking he made a lot of mistakes before he finally finished, and then the machine started up, louder and shriller than the printer or the copier. There was no way to silence it as it dialed number after number.
Some of the recipients would not understand it, but some would be alarmed. At the very least it would mean something to Malick and Nehemia. He imagined expatriates had some kind of clout, and Nehemia’s wife was very fond of Mariam. She would do something, call someone of influence.
He took a black pen and held it above another photocopy of Mariam’s picture. He was going to write her name and the details of her disappearance, and a way to reach him with information. He didn’t know which phone number to write. His own? Arifah’s? The pen hovered over the paper for a long while but he couldn’t manage to make a single mark. He wondered if the picture could speak for itself. People would see her and wonder
who she was. They would ask questions. It would be an embarrassment to the government. He made more copies of the photograph, as many as he could before he ran out of paper. He found a field bag in one of the other offices. It had tools in it, rock hammers, chisels, folding hand lenses and maps. He dumped them all out and went around his office grabbing things, current projects, notebooks, an address book, and a pile of unopened mail. He looked out the window and didn’t see any military vehicles. He needed to hurry and get his car out of the courthouse lot. After that, he didn’t know what to do.
He hoisted the heavy field bag onto his shoulder and went cautiously out into the corridor. The corridor was clear and quiet, so he opened the door to the stairwell. He ran down the stairs and got all the way outside before he fell upon a trio of militia guards. They pushed him against the stone exterior of the science building and tore the bag from his shoulder. “How did you get in there?”
“My key,” John said. “I have a master key.”
They searched his pockets for the keys and pulled out his key ring. He was ordered to turn around and identify the master. One of the guards pointed a rifle at John’s chest, the other held up the key ring, and the last one opened the field bag and shuffled through its contents.
“What is all this?” the field bag guard asked.
“My research.”
“You can’t take anything out,” the one with the rifle said. “The campus is closed.”
“Since when?” John asked. “It was open yesterday.”
“It’s shut today,” he said glibly.
“That’s my work,” John said.
The one with the field bag held up Mariam’s picture. “What kind of work is this?”
For the first time, John took a long look at them and recognized one of the guards from the elevator, the one with the key ring now.
“You were at the library yesterday,” John said. “You remember my wife. Do you know where they took her?”
The one with the key ring didn’t answer. He walked away and tested the master in the lock. The door opened. He pocketed the key and handed the rest of them back to John.
The rifle was lowered. The field bag was zipped.
“You’re free to go,” one of them said, but they flanked his bag when they noticed him staring at it. John had no choice but to leave it and walk away, which he did timidly. When he was able to turn a corner and they were out of sight, he ran.
He went to College Street and waited for a tram to take him to Courthouse Square so he could retrieve his car. He waited for twenty minutes before he realized the trams weren’t running and started walking. By the time he got there, the scene outside the courthouse was chaotic, with people trying to get in and held back at the gates by the police. The police looked tense, as if they were waiting for something to pop, something to allow them to surge forward and break up the crowd. People held up pictures of their loved ones, wanting to know what had happened to them. In the past day, it seemed many had been taken into custody. Why now, John wondered, and why all at once? He knew martial law had brought a false calm, that the unrest it was trying to contain would bubble under the surface, but he had not expected things to erupt again so soon. He thought that would happen months, maybe even years later, long after he and Mariam were gone.
He walked around the block to find the lot where he had been told his car was parked. He saw his car through the chain-link fence, but there was a lock on the gate and no attendant. He rattled the gate and shouted until an officer came up behind him. The officer asked John for his arrest record. At first John panicked because he would not have thought of bringing it with him. But he remembered folding the paper into a tight wad and placing it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He took it out and handed it to the officer without unfolding it.
“Unfold it,” the officer said.
John unfolded it. He held it up to be examined.
“License?”
John pinned the long document between his arm and rib cage and pulled out his wallet. The officer, satisfied that John hadn’t stolen someone else’s arrest record just to get his hands on that battered old Fiat, unlocked the gate and let him through.
John got into his car and sped out of the lot. He rushed to get home but when he got to his street and parked, he sat in the car for a while thinking about the lost contents of his field bag. They were probably in a trashcan somewhere near the science building and he was tempted to go back and look. It was true he hadn’t thought through what to do with the copies of Mariam’s photograph, but not having them was a terrible loss, and he realized he’d left the original photograph in the copy machine. He had nothing now but Mariam’s name pounding in his head. He could have stayed in the car, consuming nothing but air until it all ran out, but he had to find Mariam and he forced himself out of the car.
He didn’t hear the commotion on the staircase until it was too late to turn back. From halfway up the stairs he heard their voices and saw their severely anguished faces; Dolly, Zoya, and Arifah had formed a brigade, looking down on him and firing questions. Dolly came down to meet him and help him up the stairs. She said his head was bleeding. He put his hand up and felt the blood above his ear. “I was hit with a baton,” he said. He had forgotten the pain for a few hours, but now it was back.
He should have stayed in the car.
Examining his injury in the kitchen, Dolly said he should have gone to the hospital but it was a good sign that he was still alive. She used words like hematoma and contusion and told Zoya to run next door and get her medical kit. The few times John had seen Dolly in her nurse’s uniform, it always surprised him that she had a job at all, but now her professionalism was a good distraction. Arifah placed a glass of water in front of him and he thanked her without looking her in the eye.
“There’s a ringing in my ear,” he told Dolly. “My ear feels blocked.”
“You’ve probably ruptured your eardrum. It will take a few months but it should heal on its own.”
Arifah finally spoke, impatient with the medical proceedings. “Where’s my daughter, John?”
He swallowed. All he could do was go over it again, what he saw from the moment he got to the library to just now when they’d found him on the stairs. He didn’t tell them that at some point in the past few weeks, Mariam had brought home a suitcase full of documents and hidden them in the closet, or that he’d found her on the floor of the nursery yesterday morning, and he had questions for Arifah as well. He would have liked to know what she knew. Did Arifah know their plans had changed, that he wasn’t going to? There were so many shameful things Mariam could have told her mother. His parents urging him to abandon her, the book and his feeble dedication, her suspicions about his infidelity, his coldness toward her after the stillbirth, which he could only now acknowledge. If Arifah hated him for all this, she didn’t show it now.
“The question is what to do,” Dolly said. “What about a lawyer?”
Neither John nor Arifah said anything. A lawyer meant a particular thing, that Mariam had to be proven innocent of a crime they couldn’t name, assuming there was some rule of law at work. As it was, John knew what happened was lawless, it was illegitimate, and at the courthouse where one would think lawyers abounded, all of those people looking for their lost ones waited unassisted. For an entire year in Alexandria he and Mariam had worked with a lawyer, who took their money and delivered nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Arifah. “I left her alone.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said unexpectedly. She must have known something about Mariam’s state of mind lately. Arifah seemed frightened, but not completely surprised by Mariam’s absence.
Dolly set to work cleaning his wound. She began by cutting away at the blood-soaked hair surrounding the gash and he flinched, startled by her fingers tugging at his hair.
“I need to talk to Misha,” he said. He’d n
ever had a reason to know Misha’s last name and didn’t know how to contact her at home. “Do you have a college directory?” he asked Dolly, hoping he could find Misha in it.
“We might have one somewhere,” Dolly said. “Zoya will look for it.”
“Where is the Inspector’s Office?” he asked. Arifah and Dolly said they’d never heard of an Inspector’s Office until today.
Here Zoya spoke up. “The Inspector’s Office isn’t part of the provincial government. They’re ‘advisors,” Zoya said with a particular emphasis that showed them what she thought of their advisory role. “To the police, militia, and army during domestic disturbances.”
“How do you know that?” Dolly asked.
“They’re always at the demonstrations. They have a certain look. Dark suits and sunglasses.”
John realized Zoya could have plastered the city with the pictures of Mariam. He was beginning to wonder if Zoya wasn’t the most important person here.
“How do we find them?” Arifah asked. “There must be a way to contact them.”
Zoya didn’t know. “I can recognize them easily. What if I follow one of them, track him for a day?” It was hard to tell if she was being serious.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Dolly shrieked, but John didn’t say anything to discourage her.
The phone rang and they all jumped. Arifah answered it. “It’s Malick,” she said. She listened to him silently for a minute, and then handed the phone to John.
“You don’t need to say anything,” Malick said. He told John he would make some calls himself, but there was a list of people who might be able to help him if he went to them in person, contacts from the Governor’s Office, the provincial interior secretary being the most important. Malick had already spoken with him and told him John would go talk to him today. John wrote down all the names, as well as home and office numbers, and handed the receiver back to Arifah.