Sweet Fruit, Sour Land

by Rebecca Ley

  I hope he is asleep. I hope he is dreaming and that he cannot hear us speak.

  2

  We have arranged our hours at the factory so that we can drop Hugo off at school in the early morning and arrive at work a little late. Mrs Donald picks him up to occupy him in the afternoons. I look forward to the days when Mathilde is at the factory, and I take him on my own.

  I tell him stories of my childhood, that Mathilde bristles at, and I tell him things about her own, too. I explain to him about France, as best I can. I try and think of small French things that he might understand, to better understand his own culture, if such a thing still exists. But I find I can only remember things that are of no consequence at all and are only snippets of things Mathilde once told me. Things like their attitude to bread; how it should be consumed as a side dish to every meal, which baffles Hugo, thinking it a meal in itself; that sugar was only taken in coffee in lumps, never granulated; that beef was bloody, tender, and not like our roast dinners (but when has he had one of those?); that lunches were hot, always, if you were doing it right; that there were different, polite ways, to address a stranger, or your superior, but oddly not God: vous not tu. There were a thousand intricate eccentricities that made up a whole people, his people.

  But he can’t understand. He can’t even understand that the way he addresses Mathilde (Maman) is both a French word – not an English one – and a generic term, not particular to her. When I try to explain it to him, his hand in mine, I seem to have confused him more than enlightened him.

  ‘Can we go there? It sounds good there,’ he says.

  ‘It’s not like that anymore, Hugo. It’s something else.’ There is no word to describe what it is. There is no way in English, or French, to describe how it is not what it once was.

  ‘Is it like here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s like here. Only, there’s a war there. And we’ve all lost it, but it carries on.’

  ‘How can it carry on if we’ve lost?’ He scuffs his feet against the pavement as though he is angry.

  ‘Because we might win it back one day. When we’re stronger.’

  I worry that he will repeat my words to Mathilde and she will be angry with me. I don’t like to remind her. But I feel that he should know.

  ‘Am I French like Maman or am I English like you?’ he says. We are approaching the church and I want the conversation to be over before we reach the door. I don’t want the other children to hear us, and wonder.

  ‘You’re both,’ I say, ‘And I’m Kenyan and Indian, too. So you are too. And you’re French and you’re English. You’re everything. And so I suppose, you can choose what you want to be.’

  ‘I just want to be normal,’ he moans the words at me, as we near the door.

  ‘No one’s normal,’ I say, and think that if humanity has learnt nothing, that would be the nothing they’ve learnt.

  I take Hugo to the classroom, gleeful, as ever, to be left amongst the children. The worksheets are on the table but I look out for Father Anthony and find he’s not there.

  I walk out in my usual routine, holding a pocket of guilt inside me for leaving Hugo. I wait for the moment when he will cry (which he never does) or call for me. But I am met with a contented silence as I leave the classroom at the back of the church. The only noise I hear is the noise I let in, the noise I hear every time I come here and try and push away from my ears.

  I hear it looking up at that crucifix, that alien symbol, meant to provoke feeling of the sort I do not feel. The pineapple has worn off by now, and I look at Jesus’ ribs, arching and protruding, and think of my own hunger.

  But then I turn, and continue my routine, and that is when a different sound enters my head, when I see it. It is the memory of the notes of the piano and it blocks out every word you ever said to me. It blocks out every word ever spoken to me, by anyone; any touch or feeling. It consumes me, without even playing a note.

  I walk over to it, tucked away by the altar. I sit down and place my hands on the keys but I do not press down. I tap my feet on the pedals, and those I do press down but they make no noise. I play in my head all the songs I once played, that my grandfather made me play. I think of Ravel and Debussy, and my fingers stretch out, in agony, thinking of Clair de Lune, and how, long after my grandfather’s hearing started to go, he still asked me to play it for him.

  I played it at those parties though no one ever knew what it was. Especially not you. I never bothered myself to explain it. I never took the time. I just played it over and over and wondered why no one ever noticed that I played the same litany of songs every night. No one ever told me to play anything different. No one ever heard it, except Mathilde. She thought it was a melancholy song, and it was for me, because it was my grandfather’s wish for me, all that money he spent on piano lessons when we came to England. It was his hands and the folds of his skin around his knuckles and the sound of them following my own. I used to fumble over it as he told me pianissimo, learning to read music along with me. I tried to make it beautiful for him. I tried to make it the saddest song in the world for him.

  I haven’t heard it for years, except in my head. And does that make it less real? Does that mean I don’t hear it? Because I think I do. I played it, on a loop, when things were bad. It brought comfort to me, and reminded me of that disappointing Cornish beach in the summer. My grandfather’s suit with his sleeves rolled up, our first experience of England, sitting with his shoes shined and his tie on, his feet pressing in the sand. It reminded me of walking around Wembley and my grandfather rubbing his forehead and looking down at me, confused. He asked me where all the beautiful British buildings were, the ones that had been promised to him. He asked me as though I should have an answer.

  I sit like this for a long time and know I am late for work. I trace my fingertips over the notes – D flat major – and I hear them, even though no noise comes from them.

  But do you see? How hard it is to make you hear it, how hard it is to explain it in words unless I play it to you? And I did play it to you, and you never listened. But I don’t need to hear the actual sound, because it’s in my fingers, and they remember without me even telling them, they remember on their own. And my throat remembers. It closes up and aches just at the memory of it.

  The light from the window falls on a shape near me, and I turn and see that it is Father Anthony. I remove my hands from the keys.

  ‘Sorry, Father,’ I say, and put my hands in my lap. But I don’t get up.

  ‘Have you dropped Hugo off?’ he says, moving towards me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can stay as long as you like, Jaminder. To pray, if you like.’

  I look up at him, and smile. ‘I’m a bit out of practice.’

  ‘All the more reason to do so.’ He’s holding a book in his hands and as he moves closer to me I see that it’s the Bible. I wonder if he reads it, if he turns its pages and believes it. He places it in front of me, his right hand lingering on its cover. ‘There are always things to take comfort in, things to read, if you wanted.’

  ‘Do I look like a Christian, Father?’ I say. ‘I just like the quiet here.’

  He removes the Bible from my hands and takes it back into his own, standing over me. ‘Do you believe in God, Jaminder?’

  I don’t look at him, and keep my hands crossed together. ‘Would it make you feel better if I did?’ I stay like that for a long time, with the both of us in silence. He stands there, unmoving, as though he is waiting for a better answer.

  ‘I’ve seen you here, walking about the church. I wondered if there was something that brought you here, aside from Hugo.’

  I lower my head away from him. I don’t know what it will do to me if I say the words out loud, but I see them in my head.

  ‘Should I repent for my sins?’ I say, and there is a bitterness in my voice that I can’t leave out.

  ‘You can,’ he says, earnestly. ‘I will listen.’

  I lift my head up. ‘I did
something terrible.’ I look towards him, but his face hasn’t moved.

  ‘You can ask for forgiveness. Jesus will forgive you.’

  I think of my grandparents. What they would think, seeing me sitting in a church like this. I almost want to laugh as I imagine telling them: it’s okay, Jesus will forgive me. ‘Is that a promise?’

  He shrugs his shoulders. ‘If you want it to be.’

  ‘I’d still like to come back,’ I say, looking at the piano. ‘If that’s okay.’

  ‘Of course,’ he says, watching me. I stand up and thank him. I walk down the aisle of the church and look up at the windows. I think of London and the grey muddle of it, and how very far away it all now seems. I was six when we arrived, almost the age Hugo is now, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t really know we’d left. I waited for a long time to go back to Kenya. These places don’t belong to me anymore.

  I know his eyes follow me out the door. I don’t look back. But I hear the music, still, of Clair de Lune. There’s a sense of relief at the end, do you remember it? The notes open, and everything goes quiet, and that small noise is all that’s left. It’s those notes I would like to play again.

  They remind me that somewhere, I have another home.

  3

  It’s Diwali soon. It passes by every year. Unnoticed, unmarked. So do many anniversaries. We mark Hugo’s birthday, but not other things. Not the things we could mark, or think about. Not you, for instance. We don’t mention you, George.

  I don’t even tell Mathilde that I think of you, and all the things you’ve done to her, to us. I know she thinks of you all the same, without me having to mention it, but I see her push it from her mind. I see her focus on Hugo instead, and the goodness of him. I see her enveloped in that gratefulness, more than any other feeling.

  So why do I still want to think about it? Think about the way you held your drink and held onto her and held onto the piano. Why do I still see London, exactly as it was? Why do I still think of the way you held your cutlery, joking about polishing the silver knives and the silver forks, lording it over me? I see it as clearly as if it were here instead of these muddy streets. I see the pavement, I see the food on the tables, I see the lights on, welcoming us, begging us to stay. All that civilisation cannot be lost, even in my head. I know it’s still there, as sure as I know I’m still a person, still in my own body. We might never hear from London again, but I know that it is there.

  We never speak of the women, either, and where we know they go. Where we might have ended up. We do not speak of these things as we sit together by a fire, where we do have kindling, and we do have a son. We watch him fall asleep together, and I watch Mathilde’s hair, falling over the arm with which she props herself up, leaning over him.

  Her hair contains a whole world, and I watch it; each strand falling about her face and her arm and down towards her son. It comforts me, the many strands that I can’t comprehend, the numerous, dense weight of it, as dark as the blue of the ocean (I remember the ocean). It comforts me because I can’t understand the complexity and the world of her hair as much as I can’t understand the complexity and the world that we now live in, the world that we used to live in, that other women went to live in, and the world that we one day will live in: that other world.

  The closeness of her hair reminds me of the closeness Gloria’s hair once held over me. She welcomed me into that little London life and let me stay late, every night, sitting at her piano so I could practise. She sat next to me on that worn out black velvet stool, and laughed, her hair brushing against my bare shoulder, drink in one hand, cigarette in another. Her hair was so perfectly formed and so dense a colour, unlike any I’d ever known. Sometimes I would move it behind her ear just as a thing to do, and she’d smile and open her perfectly red mouth, just at my marvelling at it.

  The thought jolts me awake at night, and sometimes it’s because I’ve thought of you, and sometimes it’s because I’ve thought of them, and sometimes it’s from nothing at all, and just because I am hungry. But I always turn over and look across Hugo at Mathilde’s long, dense, dark hair and am comforted by it. I am comforted by the sheer other-worldliness of it, something so human and so difficult to understand: its sheer molecular being, the fact that it exists, and stretches beyond what we see of it, stretches down into its small constituent parts and makes up this large thing that is as deep as the ground that we stand on.

  Her hair is beautiful, and I don’t think you ever knew.

  These things trouble me, and I take them with me, every time I hold Hugo’s hand and every time I go to work and focus on the stitches and remember all the things that Mathilde taught me, when we had a little time. They torment me, in a way that I can’t see them bothering her. And I am grateful for it, and resentful of it, too.

  So I happily go to church with Hugo, and although it is only ever to drop him off for school and never to attend the services, I take my time there. It is during that time that I sit at the piano and I think of something else. I think of London and Nairobi, I think of my grand-parent’s faces. I think of how hungry I am (and the limit of hunger, how hungry I could possibly be) and I wait for the food to come in. I watch Father Anthony every day, waiting for news that there is food coming in.

  It is here, as I sit at the piano, my fingers touching the keys but never pressing down, that I think of my grandfather, insisting that he eat alone at dinner, being entirely misanthropic and solitary. I think of him tearing up his roti and throwing it in his dhal, scooping it all up with a spoon. And only afterwards, when he sat in the living room with his newspaper, would he lower it, and talk to me, and tell me about that cricket ball that hit him in the mouth and knocked his teeth out. It was only then that he made me forget my embarrassment at not taking to Punjabi and whispered to me in English about the cricket club, and all the things in his life that he wanted to tell me about. It is the same for Hugo, I suppose, never knowing his true mother tongue, and never needing to.

  Because wasn’t my mother tongue the kindness that my grandfather taught me, and the way to be alone, when you needed to? Wasn’t that his way of teaching me how to speak, after all? Just like food is a language, and if it is, we don’t have it anymore. I will always mourn that more than all the Punjabi I never learnt, that Hugo will never learn, all the French too. I will mourn the loss of all the dosas I cannot give him, and the jalebis, the syrupy, dripping, sugary jalebis he cannot taste, and the spaghetti, and butter, the kind I boiled in my flat every night after my grandparents had left me (and left the world) to my own devices. I mourn all the culture that is lost to him and all the things he will never know.

  Perhaps music is the one thing that I can give him. Perhaps it is the one thing I have left, and my grandfather was right, and I should just let it take me. I should just lean into it, easily.

  So one day, when I am not at work, and Mathilde is, I take a sheet of music home to him I found in the church. It is only the two of us, in quiet occupation, on the floor. I tell him to watch my hands and I move them in front of me, following the notes, and this is my way of talking to him, this is my speaking voice. I sing to him, along with my hands pretending to play the notes, and I know he’s never heard my singing voice, and all the music in the world he’s heard is limited. He laughs, hysterical, and hits my back in amazement. He stands up and tries to sing along to a song he’s never heard. He pulls at my hair, and I tell him, Stop, you’re hurting me. But he can’t, because he doesn’t understand his own feelings, and has no other way to express them.

  ‘Mummy, why are you crying?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t stop, keep singing.’

  ‘I’m going to teach you. I’m going to teach you to play the piano for real, for yourself.’

  ‘You can’t!’ he says, then, ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll just teach you, like this.’

  I promise him that there’ll be something of his own to be good at. I promise him that he’ll be happy, f
orever, because I’ll have given him music, and it will always stay with him, no matter where he finds himself. No matter how alone he is.

  I promise him: the only thing I have to offer, I will give to him.

  Part 5

  Mathilde

  Blackberries

  1

  We walked around St James’s park the next morning. The heat had started to pick up; it wasn’t long before summer would hit like a wall of clanging humidity. But in its beginnings, the heat was just a smell and a feeling. The warm air circulated, an ominous calling that the easy heat of early summer was coming to an end.

  There was a little water left in the lake, a greying murky puddle that once housed pelicans and waterfowl. Now it housed our anxiety, as visitors came to watch the markers erected that showed how the lake had shrunk back from previous years. We stood by the marker that showed where it had stretched fifty years before. I dragged my feet across the dry, crumbling soil.

  ‘It’s still beautiful,’ George said, ‘It’s still here.’

  We crossed over the bridge and walked a figure of eight path through the centre of the park. We watched other people who strolled around it, some walking towards the allotments in Green Park, others wandering with strange curiosity to see what was left.

  I wanted to see the palace and George indulged me, leading me up the Mall along the gravel, where I noticed some grass had begun to shoot through the stones underneath. Before the edge of the park I began to notice a wall of black. I felt like I was walking down the steps of the underground, being marked out and watched, and carefully trying to avoid eye contact with those men and those batons. This presence was not leisurely, but a rigid structure of interlaced people, as though they were waiting, and ready. They stood in front of a crumbling monument, a plinth of stone, and they circled the palace’s gates, unmoving. I squinted to see if I could notice any movement from my vantage point, any gesture or speech. They were still.