by Chaitali Sen
As Dolly disinfected the kitchen table, they made a plan. Dolly would call the people on Malick’s list from her apartment, John and Arifah would head to the Governor’s Office, and Zoya would stay here by the phone; but before they dispersed, Vic showed up. John was anxious to speak to him alone and lagged behind, telling Arifah he would come find her next door when he was ready. Both the women took the hint and Zoya left too, saying she would look for the college directory. Finally John and Vic were alone in the kitchen. They started talking at the same time, but John stopped and Vic kept going.
“I came here to tell you they’re using the abandoned power station off the old highway as a detention center. Maybe Mariam is there.”
“Can we go there?” John asked. “Can we go now?”
“There are people there, trying to get the names of everyone inside. We should wait and see what they find out.”
“Which people? How do you know them?”
Vic didn’t answer him. He said no one should try to deal with the authorities alone. “Where were you this morning? I came to get you early and you were already gone.”
John told him about the office, the letter and Mariam’s photograph, the fax, and the guards who caught him. Vic was annoyed. He made John promise he wouldn’t go out alone again.
“I found something,” John said.
He took Vic to the nursery. The last time Vic was in here, he had halfheartedly helped John build a crib. Now the crib was gone, the room bare, and John opened the closet to show him the single suitcase. He didn’t want to pull it out and unzip it again. He told Vic what was inside it.
“Do you think it’s what they were after?”
John pushed the thought away, trying not to panic. It was bad enough believing Mariam had been taken away for no reason at all. This was much worse.
“Have you ever looked at these documents?” John asked. “Do you know what’s inside?” It didn’t seem impossible that Vic might have studied them at some point, but Vic confessed he’d not even known they existed. John couldn’t tell him about the little bit he’d read that morning. He couldn’t repeat it. “If I were trying to stop an uprising, I wouldn’t want these unaccounted for.”
Vic stared at the suitcase. “But no one has come here looking for them,” he said. “Which could mean no one knows they’re here.”
“Or they’re not important?” John asked. It would be all right with him if they were important to no one but Mariam. Even while it hurt him to find something she had kept hidden from him, it would be all right if they meant something to her alone.
“All the same, I think we should get it out of here,” Vic said. John didn’t argue with him. He allowed Vic to take the whole suitcase to his apartment.
John went to Dolly’s and rearranged everything. Now that Vic was here, he would take John to the Governor’s Office, Arifah would stay by John’s phone, and Dolly and Zoya would go to the hospital and find out who was being brought in.
By the time John found the right office, the interior secretary had been called into a meeting. He waited a half hour and then had an unproductive talk with his assistant, who asked him if he or Mariam had any affiliations that might have caught the attention of the Inspector’s Office. It was not an unfair question, and all John had to say was no, that there were no affiliations, but he found it difficult to continue the interview. Government types were especially good at twisting events and finding culpability. He tried to emphasize these facts: that Mariam was a librarian, and she was mourning the loss of their baby. Politics were the furthest thing from her mind.
The assistant invited him to come back in the morning, adding that the interior secretary usually got in around ten, never before ten, sometimes after.
Vic didn’t need to ask how it went. He offered John a cigarette and they sat in the car blowing smoke out the windows. John kept catching his own reflection in the side mirror and looking away, trying to keep his eyes on the dashboard. Occasionally he glanced at Vic, who was cocking his head out the window, trying to hear what was going on in front of the courthouse.
“People are never as afraid as their rulers think they should be,” Vic said. “Every regime finds this out the hard way.”
John flicked his cigarette away. He rubbed his eyes, feeling exhausted, and unlike the people Vic spoke of so admiringly, he was gripped by a terror so powerful, he felt he would do anything to be free of it.
Vic started the engine and pulled away from the curb. They were silent during the drive home, and remained silent all the way into their building and up the stairs, until Vic told him again, before they parted, not to go out alone. John watched for a moment as Vic walked down the hall and disappeared into his own apartment. He was grateful Vic was here to help him. Without Vic, John would not have had any direction at all.
He unlocked his door, remembering Arifah as he entered. She was still sitting in the kitchen, by the phone, and failed to notice him until he was standing in front of her. He said he had nothing to report. Neither did she. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked.
“I’m going to lie down,” he said.
She stood up. Since the stillbirth Arifah was always hunched, always bent over as if she was about to fall to her knees. For a long time she had seemed to defy her age, but now she looked older than her years, her skin like weathered paper wrapped around a lamppost.
“I’ll be at Dolly’s if you need me,” she said.
He didn’t move out of the doorway. “Did Mariam tell you I’m not going to Michigan?”
“Of course,” she said. Although she answered him readily, she didn’t seem eager to extend the conversation.
“Did she tell you we were leaving, the two of us?”
“Yes, she told me.”
“And was she happy about it?” He tried to remember her expression when they discussed their exit plans. When she saw her passport photos laid out on the kitchen table. When he asked her where she wanted to go. He tried, but all he could see were objects, the photos, an atlas, the imagined passports.
Arifah seemed to consider her answer carefully. “Happy? She felt you had given up so much for her. But she wanted to go with you.”
John had to accept her answer. He was desperate for a shred of relief. “I’ll find her, Arifah.”
She touched his arm. “I don’t doubt that, John.”
After she left, he couldn’t bring himself to go into the bedroom. He poured himself a drink and sat on the sofa and watched the light fade as he thought about another day passing. Another night. The apartment was dark but he didn’t switch on the lamp. He held onto his glass even after it was empty. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there when he was startled by heavy footsteps up the stairs. He heard Zoya shouting and Dolly’s door squeal open. Dolly’s and Arifah’s voices joined Zoya’s in the hall and someone started banging on the door. John switched on the lamp and stumbled across the living room.
When he opened the door, Zoya was still on the stairs, yelling for him to come down. She said, “I see her,” and somehow John managed to follow her without believing her. He could hear Dolly and Arifah on the stairs behind him and ran faster, as if this were some kind of footrace to the street.
Zoya ran to the middle of the street and pointed west. There was a figure, a woman, but he couldn’t tell if she was moving forward or standing still, if she was Mariam or not. He ran and called her name. She was limping, and stopped. It was Mariam, waiting for him. When he reached her, she fell into his arms. He could smell the blood on her.
Hardly feeling the weight of her in his arms, he pushed past Dolly and Arifah and went up the stairs. Vic was in the apartment, turning lights on like a madman, and Mariam’s face was pale in the bright light, with a red scrape on her cheek. He took her into the bathroom and Dolly and Arifah came in behind him, turning on the water and gathering towels. He laid her carefu
lly on the floor. She had no shoes and her dress was bloodied and torn, and as he lifted his hands from her body to stroke her hair they were smeared with blood. He cried out. He may have screamed, and Mariam stirred for a moment. In that moment, when he had stopped to stare at his hands and Mariam opened her eyes, Vic pulled him off of her, out into the hall, and the door in front of him was shut. Vic kept pulling him back, clamping his thick hand over John’s mouth. John’s arms were pinned and he had no idea how to fight this force surrounding him. He had no choice but to settle into the compression. He heard water pour into the bathtub and Mariam’s cries.
Zoya knelt down next to him with a wet rag and wiped Mariam’s blood off his hands.
“Let me go,” he said to Vic. He tried to sit up but Vic tightened his hold. “Please,” John said. He had been helpless all this time. All he wanted now was to stand up.
Vic loosened his grip slowly, waiting until he was sure John wouldn’t go lurching into the bathroom. He let go and helped John up. John stumbled, forgetting how to balance, and Vic walked him to the living room, sitting him down on the sofa. Zoya brought him glasses of water, which he drank obediently. After a while he was able to stand up, and pace around the room. The voices in the bathroom quieted. Sometimes he couldn’t discern any talking at all.
Soon the door opened and Dolly came out. She came into the living room but looked only at Vic. “Can you drive me to the clinic?”
“I’ll get the car,” Vic said.
“Shouldn’t we take her to the hospital?” John asked. He had stood in front of Dolly but she hadn’t noticed until he spoke. She seemed impressed with his ability to stand and form words.
“She’s dehydrated. I can bring an IV drip home sooner than she’ll get a bed at the hospital.” She told Zoya to get her purse and wait for her downstairs.
She waited, looking past him until Vic and Zoya left. When they were alone, Dolly turned to him. “I’m sure the blood is from her period. I don’t think she’s been raped.”
He wished Dolly sounded more certain. “Did she say anything?”
“Not much. It will help you to have an official doctor’s report,” she said. “I’ll get you one. It may take a few days.”
“We’ll never forget what you’ve done for us, Dolly.”
She tilted her head. She was only a few years older than him but her smile was achingly maternal. He couldn’t even imagine his own mother in a situation like this. His own mother was fading from his consciousness altogether.
Arifah opened the door and called to her.
“Wait here, John.”
She went away again. He could hear them all come out of the bathroom. Mariam was talking quite a lot, her voice melodic, somewhat trilling and birdlike. They were getting her into bed.
In a few minutes, Dolly reappeared. “She’s asking for you. Go and see her,” she said, and hurried past him to meet Vic outside. It was strange to be left there, so suddenly alone. He was eager to see Mariam, but he walked slowly toward the bedroom, afraid of finding it empty again, unsure of what was real anymore. Even as he approached the door and heard the whispers coming from the room, even as he saw Arifah sitting by the bed, he was afraid of it all disappearing.
Arifah kissed Mariam’s forehead and stood up, passing him with a brief glance. When she was gone he walked over to Mariam and knelt beside her. She was looking at him amazedly with a strange, drug-induced smile. She had been cleaned up. Her hair was wet and he worried about her getting cold in the night. He pulled the covers up to her chin. She frowned and moved her hand to his injured ear. “What happened to you?” she asked.
“I was looking for you,” he said.
“And they hurt you?”
“No, not very badly. Not like they hurt you.”
She smiled again. “Dolly gave me something to make me forget.”
“Did she save any for me?” John asked. This made her laugh. One cheek was badly scraped and slick with ointment. He kissed it softly.
“I’m ready to go now,” she said.
He hoped he understood what she meant. He said, “Soon,” and watched her fall asleep.
FIFTEEN
Misha could not have known what she was doing when she told Mariam the archives would be transferred to the War Office in Alexandria. She had talked about the burden of the transfer, of organizing them into boxes with all of the appropriate documentation. Mariam had listened impassively, while on the inside her anger was spreading like a bruise. She was certain the transfer of the archives was a punishment, because of the rebellion, because of the disobedience of the province, and Mariam harbored some unfair bitterness toward Misha as well. She thought Misha was trying to get her off the reference floor. She had made people uncomfortable by coming back to work, and all of the younger women looked terrified whenever she came near, as if her presence was poisoning their wombs.
“I’d be glad to handle the transfer,” Mariam said.
“I’m so relieved,” Misha said, smiling weakly. “You’re the only person I can trust with this.” Mariam began to pilfer the documents immediately, removing a few at a time and taking them home during her lunch hour.
Naturally, after all that, she wasn’t surprised the Inspector’s Office had come for her. They didn’t announce their reason for taking over the library, but they swept through expediently and Misha only had a few seconds to tell her she knew the archives were missing. “If they ask, tell them you don’t know anything more than that.” But the inspector had not asked her about them. His questions were about secret meeting rooms and the layout of the stacks and certain students whose names he called out, of which Mariam genuinely knew nothing. She could have answered him in complete innocence, but she was mute and her silence made him increasingly suspicious. When he stepped out of the room again, shortly after John had come to see her, Mariam ran through the storage room into a back staircase. She had planned to run out to the car. She had imagined John starting it as she ran, and driving before she even slammed the door shut, but the guards caught her on the stairs. They pinned her legs together and shackled her ankles and wrists. In the car they put a sack over her head and she was not allowed to see anything again until they dumped her in a ditch by the highway.
Mariam woke up and realized she was home now. Her skin was covered in scratches that were scabbing over and made her itch. She wanted to scrub them away and stumbled on her bandaged feet to the bathroom. Her mother came when she heard the water falling into the tub, rushing to the floor to undo the bandages, to unveil her feet. Mariam leaned back against the tub, half awake, and thought how lovely her mother still looked. Her dark gray hair was always tied now in a small bun. Her cheeks were more sunken and her eyelids sagged, but her eyes were as bright as ever.
“I woke up on a bed of pine needles,” Mariam said. Her mother looked as if she already knew. Perhaps Mariam had already told her, but did she tell her the first thing she had felt was not pine needles but the constricting pain of her womb? Her uterus was convulsing, expelling something as pointless as her blank menses or as significant as a pea-sized embryo. She had started bleeding in front of them, and there seemed to be no end to it. It was heavy, thick, a year leaking out of her. There were two of them with distinctly alternating voices. She never saw them, with her head in a sack, but they performed for each other, prodding her and joking about the things they would put inside her to stop the bleeding. She felt their hands on her ankles and cold metal on her thigh. She didn’t scream but bled and bled and bled. Her blood had saved her. She woke up in the ditch off the highway and walked inside it until it tapered and deposited her onto a lonelier road girding the pine forest. She didn’t want to be seen by passing cars. Somehow she thought being seen would be the death of her.
“I heard Daddy’s highway and followed it home.”
“What a miracle you are,” her mother said. She inspected the bottoms of Mariam’s f
eet and pressed her thumbs into them. “Are they hurting?”
“Only a little. Where’s John?”
“He had to go out. He’ll be back soon.”
“Is he all right?” she asked.
“He’ll be happy to see you up.”
Her mother threw the bandages away. The tub was full of water and she turned off the taps. Mariam stood up, gathering the bottom of her nightgown in her hands, and Mama left her alone. She stepped into the tub. She sank into the warm water and scrubbed herself with a washcloth. Her jutting collarbone, the hard points of her shoulders, the narrowness of her thighs surprised her, but the truth was that her body had always surprised her, and after the labor she had stopped looking at herself altogether. After the labor she hated her failure of a body, but now she rose from the water and glanced at her reflection and saw that it was simply her body in the mirror, not a failure or empty casing.
She put her nightgown back on, combed her hair and brushed her teeth and opened the bathroom door when she was ready. Across the hall, the door to the nursery was closed. Certainly John would have gone in there since that morning he found her on the floor. She had suffered there all night thinking about the past, her thoughts laid upon her like stone blocks—her grandfather in exile, her father and his soulmate, the question of her citizenship and even Nina, even Nina was a heavy stone on her chest. Then there was her baby, a loss she still couldn’t believe. In the morning when she opened her eyes and saw John looking down on her, she knew that he was hurt. She had obviously changed her mind. She would stay and he would go. She had to look after the archives, and he didn’t need her anymore. He was only afraid of being without her.