He did not want to see them, any of the family, no-one; and he needed at once someone. Anyone upon whom to lay ‘I’m not going’. To see from outside the self the effect of this statement. But it is never ‘anyone’ who is being sought; unacknowledged, in the deviousness, the reluctance to admit what is lodged deep, it is someone. He passed the warm voices coming from the kitchen; no, no, not the women; he found himself approaching the angle of privacy in the passage: but she was at prayer, his mother, her head bowed to her mat. He was the small boy who had burst upon her with the tale of a lost ball when she was in the middle of her devotions and had been shamed by reprimand; he slowed and turned away without her being aware of him.
And it happened to be Maryam he came upon. As he stood, back in the room the whole family lived in, every chair and cushion moulded to their weight, worn places on the carpet designed by the concourse of their feet, Maryam came smiling greeting to him on her way to the front door, leaving to clean her employer’s house. What she saw in his face and stance made her halt where she was; immediately she thought of some accident or illness in the family that somehow had been kept from her. So many dear ones, Ahmad working with knives at the butcher’s yard — she lived by tender concern for all. — What is wrong? What happened. Julie?—
— Nothing.—
— But you are— She feels her intrusion.
— Just woke up, that’s all.—
But he had now been assaulted from within by something he had not said, unable to think beyond Are you mad in response to a single meaning of I’m not going. Not going to Chicago, to Detroit, to California.
He left Maryam looking aside from him in her tact, and burst back to the lean-to, dragging the door shut behind him.
She was standing at the window. She turned with the agony of composure drawn in tight lines between her brows and around her mouth.
So you’re going back. There. Where you come from. I thought it all the time. One day. The day will be that you go home where you always say is not your home. But you see I was right. You do not know what you say. That is how it is with you. So you don’t know what you do. To people. Good luck. Goodbye. Tell them all at the Café, this shack you live in, this dirty place, and tell them you’re too good, you’re very fine, you won’t what is it — sell out, they say— you don’t live with the capitalists in California, tell them, you’ll think of everything to tell. Goodbye. Go and tell. Goodbye.
He began transformed by anger, his face dyed with rising blood, his eyes narrowed to chips of black glitter, his body strangely gathered as if to spring, and ended — as if by a knife thrust within himself — in dejection.
She was afraid of the dejection, not the anger which she had, his violent breath — taken in with open mouth. She came to him, stumbling as he had done over their baggage and he tried to fend off her hands and arms as she clung to him. Don’t say. Don’t say.
No right, hers, to say now what was eloquently unsaid ever since — certainly the first nights in the doll’s house—I love you.
Listen to me. Where did you get the idea. I’m not going back there. I don’t belong there.
She has taken his head between her hard palms and forced his face before her, she feels his texture, the nap of a day’s growth of beard against her skin. She has the image of him, one of those habitual and dear, pressing his tongue against the inner side of his cheek to tauten the flesh as he delicately shaves round his moustache; the image stored.
You know that. Saying both at once: the unsaid (that stored image is love) and what has been said, I’m not going back.
What are you talking? What is it. You are not going to America. That’s what you say. You are not going to your home. That is what you say.
And now she has to tell him what she thought he must have understood. I’m staying here.
Chapter 44
The passion of dispute that erupts like this abandons intimacy that has been respected; through the makeshift door of the lean-to it flowed to the family living-room, through the whole house, invading, overtaking the preoccupations and concerns of all who lived so closely there; as if each, even the children, looked up from these, through the day, as at a sudden sound or sight. What happens between man and wife, that’s their business, it is customary to maintain the principle of privacy even to the extent of appearing to be unaware that anything is happening. In a house crowded with relatives this is particularly stringent; not only the door of the lean-to is too thin. The surface conventions of blood ties and religious observance are able to contain subsumed almost without a ripple, for example, the presence of Khadija and its implications. But whatever is happening in the lean-to is different, it thrusts itself in demand upon the house. As son, brother, cousin he has no option, no other resource but to come out and repeat to each relative the same account of what has happened in that lean-to — from where she, the foreign wife he brought to them, does not appear, either because she accepts that he speak for her, or because he does not allow her to speak for herself. Who can say. But even when her favourite, the small Leila, is seen by him making for the lean-to door, he sends the child away.
Everyone is confronted with this account, even those who are only embarrassed and bewildered by a situation they cannot understand, they shouldn’t be admitted to. Something that belongs to the life of this family member so different from theirs, lived unimaginably in worlds they do not know. As if he could expect some explanation, support, from them in their innocence, the ignorance he has always made them aware they live in. His brothers Ahmad and Daood listen to him in disbelief, a woman does what her husband says. They are too loyal to him, too respectful, to reveal what this makes him immediately alert to again: the stigma on his manhood. The women — she’d now joined them, the kitchen was the neutral ground from which to take the right of entry by way of household tasks, playing with their children, exchanging pidgin-language — when he approached the women their embarrassment emanated from them like sweat. It was from their gathering under the awning they spoke at all. She is a very good person. It will be all right. She will do what is right, she is a wife. Sometimes we just get upset, you know, for a while, then it passes, ma sha allah.
His insistence drove them into silence. — There is no time for a mood to pass. Two days. That’s it. I want to know, has she talked to you. This business. Staying here. In this place. Have you said anything like that to her? Have you? I need an answer. Has she been talking like this?—
Amina looked round over the bundle of her baby at the others and shook her head conclusively, earrings swinging, in mandate of denial.