So why? Why? Why did you come? Why — you bought that ticket for yourself? You hung on to me? What for? Don’t say it! Just don’t say it. Not now.
His conviction that ‘love’ is a luxury not for him has found its proof. Yes.
Won’t have her say it; she sees. Say something else that has the same meaning.
Ibrahim, you’d think I was leaving you, the way you take it. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going back there, I’ve told you, told you. I’m in your home.
You are a liar. Why did you never say one word to me? You were lying to me all the time. Here in this bed with me kissing and lying. Fucking and lying.
I never lie to you.
Ah no? You only lie with the mouth? Keep quiet when there is what you must say, that’s not lying?
I thought, I really thought you saw how I was beginning — you make it so hard to explain — to live here. Oh my god. How I was different — not the same as I was back there when you met me. I thought we were close enough for you to understand, even if it was something you — didn’t expect …
Not lying when you got the money from your uncle for the tickets? Not lying when you signed the papers for the visa, not lying when you went smiling to the embassy to show them your face, my wife ‘accompanying me’, you saw it written on my visa? No? That was not lying? Or was that true then, and now — I don’t know, out of the sky something somebody has changed your mind, driven you crazy? Where did you get the idea from, how, where?
And while his anguish batters them both she now knows where. The desert.
But she cannot tell him that. The stump of wall in the sands where the street ends. The dog waits and a child places a hand.
She cannot tell him that.
He shuns the desert. It is the denial of everything he yearns for, for him. And if he should remember — the enthusiasms of some members of The Table — his next derision could be that her decision was a typical piece of sheltered middle-class Western romanticism. Like picking up a grease-monkey.
Confusion is singing in his ears. But what is the confusion? No confusion; I should know that. Like me, like me, she won’t go back where she belongs. Other people tell her she belongs. She looks for somewhere else. I’m staying here. Here!
The elegant suitcase is standing packed. Finally he can’t stop staring at it. He lunges to it and struggles with the digital lock, the combination comes to him and he gets it open and begins to throw out all her things; on the bed, on the floor. Now she will do it. Put them back, give in.
She comes to him through the mess. She tries to draw him against her tightly, breasts to chest, belly to belly, but he resists wildly and the embrace becomes a parody of the violence that has never existed between them. Some short time before dawn of the day on which they are to emigrate, like corpses laid out side by side on what was their bed: sleep drugs with its ancient promise from childhood, it will be all right in the morning.
Chapter 46
He got up dazed and dulled with the hangover of emotion and went to his brothers. She woke to their low voices behind the lean-to door. She left the bed, dizzied for a moment, and then collected the contents of her suitcase scattered everywhere. She folded some garments on the wire he had rigged up for her and the bright plastic hangers she had found in the market, hung the pants, dresses and shirts. The shoes went to their place in a row under the window.
He came back into the room with a bucket of hot water. He saw her things, the clothes hung up, folded, the shoes where she kept them. He looked only for a moment; and not at her; he poured water into the bowl on the table and began to shave. Although his back was turned, she could see his face in the little mirror strung to the wall in which he met himself as he was on this morning. She saw, once more, his cheek thrust taut by his tongue as he delicately shaved close to his glossy moustache.
From the neat pile of underwear on the bed she took a bra and panties and began to dress.
He was aware of her movements somewhere around him, somehow slowed, as his own were. When he had shaved and washed he poured his water into the empty jar kept beside the table and refilled the bowl from the bucket he had brought. He heard her washing as he dressed himself for the journey in jeans she had learned to iron just as well as the black woman she paid to do it, back at the cottage, a shirt she liked best, and the silk scarf that was his plume. While her back was to him he happened to glance and saw in the little mirror the gestures of her hands, the upward tilt of her neck as she looped her earrings into her ears; once more.
He spoke. Are you coming to eat?
She looked round as at a call. Yes, in a moment.
Everyone was at home; apparently Maryam, the brothers, had been given leave to arrive late at work, be present for this latest farewell. The brother-in-law was unemployed at present, anyway. Over food there was subdued chatter, suitable to an imminent departure, on the route to be taken, the country where a connecting aircraft would be, the time-change in space, a further separation of the voyagers from kin. She appeared, dressed in what became her best, a combination of pants made of handsome hand-woven local textile and a jacket bought long ago on some jaunt in Italy. A necklace given her by Maryam brought the exchange of a slight smile between them. When Ahmad asked her how long was the wait between connecting planes, she answered round about three hours. Ibrahim corrected, more like four or five, there are always delays on airports this side of the world — drawing laughter in which she joined. Daood the coffee-maker turned fondly to his brother. — Maybe you’ll be lucky and everything will go all right, for you, on time.—
Muhammad, excused from school, was quick. — And when Julie goes next month, it must be lucky for her too!—
So she understood what the low voices behind the door had been about: it was arranged among the adult brothers that the official family version of what had happened would be that their brother’s foreign wife would be following him as soon as he knew in what city of this immigration he would find himself established.
He kept away from her, in the company of the family, making sure there was no chance for them to be alone until the hour of the taxi arrived for him. Let her have an idea of what she doesn’t realize, all his pleading, arguing, of no effect, that she will be in this house, this family, this village, this place in the desert, without him, without the love-making she needs so much, without anyone to talk to who, as he does, knows her world, without — yes, he can admit it to himself only, without his love for her. That weakness that is not for him.
She could not approach him. He held her off by his right, as she had asserted hers. She was not going; in all the pain of seeing him return to the same new-old humiliations that await him, doing the dirty work they don’t want to do for themselves, taking the hand-out patronage of the casino king (stepfather, is he) as the chance of being the Oriental Prince, quaint way-out choice of the mother’s daughter. That’s it. That’s reality.
Neighbours came to see off the lucky one bound for America. The taxi ordered so well in advance drew up in the home street before the family house exactly when expected. In the gathering she stood with him now, their clothes touching in contact, they would keep up together the version he had arranged with the brothers; it was all she could do for him for the present, her lover, her wonderful discovery back there in a garage. Everyone embraced him, children ran to him to touch the great adventure, the achievement that is emigration, not understood but sensed.
Muhammad rushed up with the canvas bag and neighbours added plastic carriers with gifts of food for the journey. The son embraced the family in the order of protocol they knew, embraced his father and then, last, his mother. She blessed him. And made a slight movement as if directing: her son embraced his wife. Before them all, the women who watched from behind curtains across their street, the men who looked away from her where they mended their cars and motorbikes, the close neighbours who flitted in like swallows to visit, the children Leila brought along for games — he and she held one another, and there was a kind of gasp of silence. Some old man with the loud voice of the deaf broke it.