by Chaitali Sen
She had to gather her courage to go into the nursery again. She did it all in a few steps, entering the room, opening the closet door, seeing that the suitcase had been removed and leaving the empty closet and empty nursery with all the doors swung open. She left the bedroom door ajar as well and put on a yellow dress. Then she sat on the bed, waiting for John.
She heard him come home and ask a question to her mother, who answered back in a lilting tone. He walked down the corridor, his footsteps urgent until he reached the open door of the nursery. He must have imagined Mariam in there, looking in the closet. After that his steps were slower and faint. He appeared timidly in the doorway, looking thin and clean with his hair carefully parted and combed like a schoolboy’s. It was a relief to see him in this daylight, to sit up with her head clear and be able to examine him. He looked back toward the door, toward the hallway and the nursery, distracted by the secret she had kept from him. She wanted him to understand why she had taken the archives. She had to take them. It wasn’t a choice, but she didn’t know where to begin.
He said, “Vic has the suitcase.”
Mariam had not been at all worried about the whereabouts of the suitcase. She knew John had moved it, and that Vic had helped him. “Misha said the archives were going back to Alexandria,” she explained, “but they belong here. They’ll be destroyed in Alexandria.”
John said he knew, he understood, trying to keep her calm. He assured her they would not go back to Alexandria. Vic would take care of them. He would know what to do with them. And Mariam tried to show him she was satisfied. She could see that John was anxious, lacking confidence in himself. It must have been such a shock to him, preparing for one thing and finding out she had been preparing for another.
She reached out, needing him to come closer. She had always hidden her need, thinking it was a yoke he would want to cast off. It had made him insecure, unsure of what he had given her, but now he would know. She needed him to take care of her. He came forward, knelt and bowed his head. He brushed his fingers gently along the edge of her foot that had been bandaged. He was hurt too. His ear was red and his cheek bruised. She didn’t know what had happened to him, but one day there would be the time and desire to tell each other what they had suffered. “I was going to stay with them,” she confessed. “I was going to give you up and stay with them. I thought, that’s all I can do. I can keep the archives here.”
He looked wounded, and at the same time relieved. This was what he’d wanted to know. “Were you afraid to go with me, Mariam?”
“Yes, I was afraid,” she said truthfully.
“Why? Have I hurt you too much? Are you angry with me?”
“I wasn’t angry with you, John. I was afraid everything that had happened to us would happen again somewhere else. That thought kept coming into my head and I couldn’t stop it.” Her fear was of the past constantly repeating itself, but it was gone now. She was able to remember it without it conjuring any of the same sensations, the same terror. She was stronger, maybe because she now knew what it meant to truly be afraid, to fear for her life and body, making all of her old fears that were not rational seem childish. The inspector had frightened her. The militia had frightened her. She had run from them because she didn’t want them to take her, but they had caught her and frightened her more. She was trying to get back to John, where she knew she would be safe. “We survived them, John. They have no authority over us anymore.” Did he know what she meant? There was a force that was always taking things from them, always fighting them, and they were always losing. They had given up enough. She wanted some things for herself now.
He took her into his arms and held her, cautiously at first and then more tightly. He said, “I’ll die before I let them take you again.” His body was shaking, pulsing with adrenaline and heavy with exhaustion. “When can we go?” she whispered.
He said they could go as soon as she wanted. Their passports would be ready the next day. John was confident they’d be done well. Cyrus was already in Budapest. He had reported to Vic that it was an easy passage.
Her mother called them for breakfast. They went to her, and ate only a little, and after breakfast, they spent the whole day preparing, cleaning their apartment, emptying cupboards and closets. They couldn’t rest until nightfall, when they forced their aching bodies to bed. “Tomorrow you’ll have a passport,” he said, and she could almost feel the weight of it in her hand.
The next morning was a vigil. The phone rang three times and stopped. John picked up the receiver and hung it up without saying hello.
“They’re ready,” he announced.
Mariam, Arifah, Dolly and Zoya saw him off and then waited, drinking cups of tea and eating biscuits. Dolly and Zoya argued lightly about everything under the sun. Arifah made more tea and Mariam watched the hands of the clock. They moved, but time was not passing. “What’s taking so long?” she asked. She didn’t even find out where he’d gone, how far away it was.
Two hours went by. Her mother was exceptionally quiet. After hardly saying a word, she asked quietly, “Will it be easy to leave us, Mariam?”
Mariam held her hand. She didn’t want to think about the pain of that separation. “Of course not, Mama.”
Her mother dabbed her eyes with a napkin. “Look at me. I’m being ridiculous.”
No, they all protested. It wasn’t ridiculous at all.
“I think I’ll go and get Omar. Bring him here for lunch.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Dolly said. “We’ll all have lunch at our place, all together. Maybe Vic can join us. Zoya, you’ll see if Vic is home and invite him to lunch.”
“He isn’t home. I saw him go out this morning and he hasn’t been back,” Zoya said wistfully. Zoya, Mariam had observed lately, was a little bit girlishly in love with Vic. Poor Vic and poor Zoya.
“I would like to see Daddy here,” Mariam said.
They were discussing it when they heard John’s key in the door. He came in beaming, not looking at all surprised that everyone had stayed, waiting for this passport. Mariam shot out of her seat but her legs shook too much to walk. Dolly and Zoya flanked him. “Do you have it? Can we see it?” they asked.
John paid no attention to them. He kept his eyes on Mariam and told her to sit down. When she was back in her seat, he came forward, took the passport out of his breast pocket and presented it to her like a single rose.
It was a beautiful object, thicker than she had imagined, with a burgundy cover that was plastic, but leathery, embossed in golden lettering and the emblematic seal of their country, a cypress tree. Inside she saw her black and white photograph and a name. Marie Chaboud. She flipped through it and found a form stamped in purple ink, their French visa ostensibly issued from the French Consulate in Alexandria. The blanks were filled in heavily with a fountain pen. She tried to imagine a real bureaucrat at the real consulate stamping and writing with practiced efficiency. Names. Dates. Genre de visa. Long sejour.
“It looks so real,” she said.
“It is real,” he reminded her. “We have to believe it’s real.”
“Enfin je deviendrai à l’aise en français,” she said. The French rolled off her tongue so easily she could barely catch the words before they fluttered away. Everyone looked at her, amazed by her foreign speech. Only John was likely to have understood her. He knew a little French, though he was always shy to use it around her. She didn’t want to let go of the passport but her hands were trembling and she was afraid of tearing the pages. She handed it to her mother, and while the rest of them looked at it, John and Mariam sat across from each other, missing all the activity around them. Arifah left, Dolly and Zoya left, and suddenly they looked around and found themselves alone, having missed everyone’s departure. But everyone was back for Dolly’s lunch, even Vic, who came home just in time.
SIXTEEN
The passports were forged in a large concrete block apar
tment building, its long, institutional corridors stretching and bending like sewer pipes. John found the right apartment and knocked on the door several times. A groundswell of chaos erupted, children shouting and a dog barking, before the door opened and John was ushered into a back room. From the kitchen he could smell something being fried in oil, an aroma that aroused a wild physical hunger for the first time in days. When he first came here he was doubtful about Cyrus’s recommendation, but both father and son seemed competent and sufficiently cautious. Yesterday, when he called on them unexpectedly to explain his new situation, with the mystery of Mariam’s disappearance and reappearance, they listened with great sympathy. They had questions about Mariam, about why she was taken and released so quickly. They wanted to know if she’d been compromised, if she was possibly being followed, and if she knew exactly where John was at this moment, and John said no emphatically to all of their questions. Overall, it was a relief to tell these strangers what he’d been through. They must have felt his sense of urgency since it was less than twenty-four hours later and he was back to pick up the passports. The son discussed with him their new names and why they were chosen. His surname was French because of a newly imagined French grandfather. John had schoolmates in Alexandria with French surnames so this didn’t seem at all inconceivable. He was also given a new driver’s license so that he would have a secondary identification, and with this, John was convinced his documenters had thought of everything.
The father showed him the route on a map, driving northwest through mountainous backroads to the Kulna Fort station where it was easy to cross the border by train. They would switch to an express train to Istanbul, take another train to Bucharest, and fly from Bucharest to Paris. The train crossing was the hardest part of the journey but safer than taking a flight out of Alexandria these days. John had questions about how to behave if certain situations came up, which they answered if they could, and finally, anxious about getting home to Mariam, he shook their hands and left. He said he would never forget what they’d done for him.
The women had arranged a lunch at Dolly’s. Afterwards, he and Mariam sequestered themselves inside their apartment and talked about their exit. They looked at a map of Alexandria, hoping the capital had not changed much in the years they’d been away. They had to recreate a life there. They had to write a new story over the last six years of their lives and convince themselves they had lived in Alexandria exclusively, that their passports were issued on Park Street and their visa at the French consulate in Parliament Square, that they were both teachers in Cypress Gardens, childless, and using a small inheritance to travel and work abroad for a few years. They went over what they would say if they were interrogated, but there was a limit to how much they could imagine things going wrong. He found there was an inverse relationship between imagination and confidence and they decided, not explicitly but by omission, by the way their voices became weak when they spoke about being stopped or separated, that confidence was paramount.
He told Mariam they could pack nothing that contradicted their made-up history, nothing that could reveal their true identities if they were to be interrogated. It might have been preferable to have something to offer as evidence, papers, photographs, small gifts from Alexandria to give out to people they expected to meet on their journey, but there was not time for that. Mariam said an imaginary world that was too elaborately constructed could easily become a trap, and they could always use the length of their sojourn abroad to justify their light packing. Who wanted to drag a heavy suitcase around Europe?
Choosing the right suitcase and filling it was the last thing they did. Before that they had to make sure whatever they left behind could be cleared out easily. Dolly had volunteered but Mariam didn’t want her to be burdened with decisions. She had their few possessions organized into stacks and boxes with instructions placed on top. In the dining room, she was preparing packages for Dolly to mail to Malick. John came up behind her as she wrapped her notebook about her grandfather in newspaper and slipped it into a manila envelope. Her treatment of it was careful but unceremonious.
“We could put that in the suitcase,” he said. He was afraid of what would happen if it was lost.
“I’d know it was there,” she said. “It’s safer this way.”
She sealed the envelope and looked around, surveying the table. Her eyes settled on the book, which had remained on the dining table since their celebration. It had been moved to the edge and sat by itself, unpackaged and lacking instruction. “I thought we could give this to Vic. He’ll want to read it.”
John agreed, though he didn’t care if Vic read it or not. The book was too many things at once, and he didn’t know how to let go of those things and simply let it exist as an object separate from the circumstances that created it. For him, he realized, it had mainly been a way to keep Mariam occupied in Luling, to distract her from the fact that they were trapped there. Luling was a cage within a cage, a courtyard of a prison. If he had not found something to engage her, she would have died of boredom and despair. She would have left him, thinking it would improve his life to be without her. Now there was a book with his name on it, a theft of her time and intellect, and there was nothing in it to show what it really meant to him, that he loved her, he loved her more than it should have been possible to love someone, and he needed her.
“Do you think the book will help us?” he asked. If it helped him get a job, if it helped them in their immigration applications, if it helped them find a country that would welcome them, then at least it would be useful.
“I’m sure it will help,” she said. “And it will help us remember our home. We may never see it again.”
He felt a rush of emotion, understanding something now that he couldn’t understand before. Perhaps Mariam had always known they would leave like this. He wanted to imagine a time when they would long for this place, their hearts overflowing with nostalgia. They would be old, with all of their struggles behind them. Missing a place they left long ago would be a minor heartache, a twinge, something that came in waves.
Together they packed one suitcase. This was their final task, and strangely ritualistic, as if this undertaking replaced the other important things they should have done together. They had not held or dressed or buried their child, but they could do this. They could put their life in a suitcase. Once they had done that, and their apartment was nearly empty, it was unsettling to linger in it. He went down the hall and told Vic they were ready. They had already said goodbye to Dolly and Zoya, but Vic would walk them to their car. Vic carried their suitcase for them. He heaved it into the trunk. He held onto Mariam for a long time, whispering something into her ear. He gave John a hearty embrace, slapping him on the back, but before they let go, Vic kissed him gently on his cheek.
That night, they stayed with Omar and Arifah, turning in at a reasonable hour after an evening meal and a few hours of conversation. In the old master bedroom upstairs John tried to soothe Mariam’s restlessness. She worried about the morning’s goodbye. “We should leave quickly,” she said. “There’s no point in dragging it out.”
“We’ll leave early,” he agreed. “It’s a long drive.”
“She’ll try to feed us.”
“We’ll have coffee and go.”
He had no idea if she slept at all. In the morning, he found her sitting with her parents in the kitchen. It was just past dawn and still dark out. Arifah said they would be stopped if they left now.
John didn’t argue. Unlike Mariam, he wasn’t even dressed yet. He had a cup of coffee before he went back upstairs to get ready. He tried to be quick, but as swiftly as Mariam had wanted this to pass, the moment of their departure couldn’t be hurried. Arifah stroked Mariam’s hair, and kissed the bridge of her nose like she must have done when Mariam was a little girl. Mariam balled up her hands as she clung to her mother, and wept quietly against her shoulder.
Then, Omar, who seemed
willfully confused. Mariam wrapped her arms around his neck, but he could barely lift his own to return her embrace. John wondered if anyone had explained this parting to him. Mariam pulled away and held both of his hands, looking intently into his eyes for some sign of comprehension. She said she loved him, and asked him to take care of her mother, and he spoke, finally. He said, “Mariam,” in a soft, high-pitched voice, and John realized he did understand. He understood this was the last time he would see his daughter. Whatever their relationship had been, there were no more chances to improve it.
His own goodbye took no time at all. He kissed the top of Omar’s head, and Arifah’s. She patted his cheek and gave him a stern look that he had no trouble interpreting.
Once they were in the car, Mariam’s body heaved for a minute. John was afraid to start the engine, but then she breathed in, and composed herself almost unnaturally, as if she’d been smoothed by a sculptor’s hand.
When John told Mariam they would be traveling through Kulna Fort, she didn’t believe him. In Luling, she had told him of her desire to visit it, and he said they would go one day. That day, remarkably, had come. For the book, they had written about the construction of Kulna Fort from red sandstone without ever seeing it, studying pictures in order to describe the walled city, the five gates, the villages in its shadow and their crumbling economy. All of their research could not have prepared them for their first glimpse of the red wall, and its gradual unfurling along the road that wrapped around its base like a ribbon. The sun was setting behind the looming central mosque, darkening the sandstone to an ashy maroon. Mariam opened her window and craned her neck to look up at the high octagonal towers.
They found a charming inn just inside the wall, not as expensive as he’d feared, and they spent the evening walking around the old city. They were surprised to see quite a few tourists, some of them foreign. There were a lot of stalls selling the same souvenirs, and beggars of all ages who followed Mariam faithfully, seeing how often she stopped to hand out coins. The atmosphere was a bit depressing but the fort itself was grander, sturdier, redder, more ornate and more complex than they could have imagined. Mariam was elated. This was their only chance. Soon they would be gone and they would not be able to come back, not for many years at least.