I Think of You Read online

  “What about tension?” I say. “What about misery? What about loneliness?”

  “They are animals, these people,” she says, “animals. They don’t understand a thing. They think if they have rules, it makes them civilized. But never mind, pet. You just think of your baby and be a good girl and we’ll have you out of here very soon.”

  My students phone me and send me flowers and fruit. They offer to take my little girl to their houses to swim, to play with their children. But no one can bring her here to me.

  My husband phones me every day. He has tried to get a visa to come over, but they tell him it has to be sent from this end and will take at least three weeks. “You’ll be out of that damned place then, won’t you?” he says. “You’ll be home.”

  I correct my exam papers, and after each question I have to stop to take my breath and pluck at the elastic of my bra.

  Outside, after I left you, I looked up at your house—your father’s house and his father’s before him—and it was ablaze with lights. And there in the street, I hugged my old friend, your husband, and the doorman turned away and wiped his face with his wide sleeve.

  My mother phones and tells me you have been to America and back, and no, you are not better. Do you think of death? Yo u must do. You must know you are dying. Half your stomach taken out, the needle plastered to your hand ready for your next feed. Your brother scouring the medical depots for supplies, your doctors on twenty-four-hour rotations, your family coming and going and no one ever mentioning the dread name of your disease. All the talk was of ulcers and vague complications and exploratory surgery, not of the removal of chunks of stomach and yards of intestine—not of the disease that maneuvers like mercury, finding fresh footholds as the old are cut away. You must know. Your husband said you did not. He said it was better like this, you would not be able to take it. Is this the last kindness you are doing him, allowing him to believe you do not know? Playing it his way to the end? Letting him off grand finales and anguished summings-up?

  For three days my mother does not call. When on my tenth day in this room she calls and I ask after you, she begs me not to take it too badly, to think of my blood pressure, to think of my baby, to think of my daughter. Every possible thing was done. There was nothing more anybody could do.

  A nurse comes in with the Sudanese doctor. She stands by as he bends over me. He slips his hand under the cover and speaks kindly. “What are you doing to your blood pressure? I will try not to hurt you. Yes, you are dilating. We want to try to hurry things up. Your blood pressure is much too high. It is all this crying. Why do you make yourself so unhappy? But it may still be possible to have a normal delivery.”

  “Is the baby all right?” I ask.

  “You are in the eighth month. God willing, the baby will be fine.”

  He rims between my legs three times with hard fingers and a nurse hurries in to listen with her black box at the wall of my belly.

  On the back of your hand I saw the needle go into the blue vein. In my hand all detail has vanished; the tube disappears under a spaghetti junction of bloodied plaster. I lie and listen out for the movements of my baby, for the little left hooks to my liver or the flurry of kicks that precedes him falling asleep in a tight ball that wrenches my whole body to one side. He does not move and I imagine him gasping for breath as the cord that connects us fails to deliver the oxygen he needs. No, as I fail to deliver the oxygen he needs. I carefully disengage my arm from the railing and rub slowly along the side of my belly, coaxing him, willing him to wake, to kick. I try not to think of you, and as I cast about for other thoughts, I feel the tears on my face while image after unbearable image presents itself to my mind. Five years ago, sitting in the Paprika with my husband when he was still in love with me, he caught my hand across the table and raised it to his mouth. In the car, in the desert, he pushed his hand between my thighs. I want, I want to be five years old and playing in the sunshine on my grandmother’s carpet. I want to be at my nineteenth birthday party with all my friends and you, newly wed, dancing into the room with an armful of white lilies and blue irises. I want to be home. When I turn my head I see, out of the window, a woman cross the parking lot in the glaring sun. Her black abaya billows out around her and she clutches at it and bends forward as she fights the dust-laden wind.

  In the dead of night my phone rings. As I reach for it in the dark I try to still my heart, for I imagine each startled beat adding to the pressure on my baby. What more can happen now? A man’s voice, speaking low, calls me by name. An admirer, he says, a well-wisher, one of your doctors, he says. If he spoke in Arabic I could tell which one by his accent, but he speaks only English to me. He says, “I know you cannot leave your bed. Would you like me to be with you? Your breasts are very big now. They hurt you, don’t they? If I suck them I can make them better.” I put the phone down and he rings again and again. I keep the phone off the hook, but if my daughter needs me, if something should happen—I put the receiver back.

  When it came, it came suddenly, just as my neighbor—my savior, it turns out—had said it would. How could I, who had been stalked for so long, still be taken so completely by surprise?

  On the eleventh day my daughter on the phone asked, “Do you still like the butterfly I gave you?”

  “Yes, darling,” I said.

  “Will it always be nice for you?” she asked.

  “Of course it will,” I said.

  “And you won’t ever hate it ever, will you?”

  “Of course not, sweetheart,” I said. “I adore it.”

  I turned my head to negotiate the tubes and replace the receiver and felt a muffled rush as though I sensed a distant sea breaking against rock. As the receiver dropped, I was pushed under by the rushing waves.

  Of the time after, fragments only remain. My teeth chattering so hard that my skull reverberated with the sound. Cloth wedged into my mouth, then removed as I started to retch. My stomach empty, but a thin stream of bile continuing to eject itself in bitter spurts through my throat. The wetness flowing from me, whether it was water or blood I never knew. The rhythmic blows behind my eyes that shook my body. And voices talking to me, and hands, hands holding, mopping, wiping, carrying me. And then a room with a fierce white light and Othello and the mad-eyed Syrian and other figures busy around me and a churning and grinding kneading my body from waist to groin and needles going into my arms and back and a voice in my ear saying, “Your husband is on the phone. He wants you to know that he is with you always,” and a matador in overalls and a mask and shower cap braced between my legs and the white light burning, burning into all the pain and noise until an angel in a black veil dimmed it and turned it away from my face and came and bent over me and I must have said something, for she said, “Have courage, sister. I shall not leave you,” and she held my hand and the ankle of one splayed leg and every time I slipped under that roaring tide I floated up again to hear her soft recitative, her unending verses of Qur’anic comfort.

  He fought his way out, my brave baby boy, and they took him away to an incubator, warm and silent and still as I could not be. And they worked hard at me for what I later learned were three nights and three days until at last, as I lay once again in my old bed, empty and clean and calm, they delivered to me a warm, soft bundle. And holding it close, I folded back the flowered wrappings and saw for myself the breathing brown body, the cut cord, the downy head, the long, black lashes, the curled fingers, and my name on the tag around his wrist.

  My daughter on the phone says, “Tomorrow we’re coming to get you.”

  I say, “I know. I can’t wait.”

  “Have you finished your exams?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, “they’re done.”

  “Then we can go home,” she says, “because we have to show the baby to Daddy.”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “Absolutely, sweetheart.”

  In the Meridien, all those years ago, with the Nile shining behind you, I said, “But you’ve been marr
ied nine years. Can one trust passion, romance? Can one really trust being in love?” A shadow passed across your face. “Well,” you said after a moment, “of course things change. Yes, they do. But I think now, perhaps, sympathy—yes, sympathy and tenderness and goodwill. They can last, if we’re wise. Maybe they are the lasting part of love. My husband has those. And your man, from what you say, has them too.”

  Yo u had everything I wanted: confidence, high cheekbones, a long-running play, a happy—well, comparatively happy—second marriage. I think of you on Friday nights, the door of your lit-up house open onto the garden, the garden gate open onto the road. You move between your guests, your husband, your pets, your children, your mother, your servants. You make conversation, drinks, and food, and I watch you lightly draw the fine-lined patterns that pull so many lives together. My dear, oh, my dear, you made it look so easy.

  Sandpiper

  Outside, there is a path. A path of beaten white stone bordered by a white wall—low, but not low enough for me to see over it from here. White sands drift across the path. From my window, I used to see patterns in their drift. On my way to the beach, I would try to place my foot, just the ball of my foot, for there never was much room, on those white spaces that glinted flat and free of sand. I had an idea that the patterns on the stone should be made by nature alone; I did not want one grain of sand, blown by a breeze I could not feel, to change its course because of me. What point would there be in trying to decipher a pattern that I had caused? It was not easy. Balancing, the toes of one bare foot on the hot stone, looking for the next clear space to set the other foot down. It took a long time to reach the end of the path. And then the stretch of beach. And then the sea.

  I used to sit where the water rolled in, rolled in, its frilled white edge nibbling at the sand, withdrawing to leave great damp half-moons of a darker, more brownish beige. I would sit inside one of these curves, at the very midpoint, fitting my body to its contour, and wait. The sea unceasingly shifts and stirs and sends out fingers, paws, tongues to probe the shore. Each wave coming in is different. It separates itself from the vast, moving blue, rises and surges forward with a low growl, lightening as it approaches to a pale green, then turns over to display the white frill that slides like a thousand snakes down upon itself, breaks and skitters up the sandbank. I used to sit very still. Sometimes the wave would barely touch my feet, sometimes it would swirl around me, then pull back, sifting yet another layer of sand from under me, leaving me wet to the waist. My heels rested in twin hollows that filled, emptied, and refilled without a break. And subtle as the shadow of a passing cloud, my half-moon would slip down the bank—only to be overtaken and swamped by the next leap of foaming white.

  I used to sit in the curve and dig my fingers into the grainy, compact sand and feel it grow wetter as my fingers went deeper and deeper till the next rippling, frothing rush of white came and smudged the edges of the little burrow I had made. Its walls collapsed and I removed my hand, covered in wet clay, soon to revert to dry grains that I would easily brush away.

  I lean against the wall of my room and count: twelve years ago, I met him. Eight years ago, I married him. Six years ago, I gave birth to his child.

  For eight summers we have been coming here; to the beach house west of Alexandria. The first summer had not been a time of reflection; my occupation then had been to love my husband in this—to me—new and different place. To love him as he walked toward my parasol, shaking the water from his black hair, his feet sinking into the warm, hospitable sand. To love him as he carried his nephew on his shoulders into the sea, threw him in, caught him and hoisted him up again—a colossus bestriding the waves. To love him as he played backgammon with his father in the evening, the slam of counters and clatter of dice resounding on the patio while, at the dining room table, his sister showed me how to draw their ornate, circular script. To love this new him, who had been hinted at but never revealed when we lived in my northern land, and who after a long absence had found his way back into the heart of his country, taking me along with him. We walked in the sunset along the water’s edge, kicking at the spray, my sun hat fallen on my back, my hand, pale bronze in his burnt brown, my face no doubt mirroring his, aglow with health and love—a young couple in a glitzy commercial for a two-week break in the sun.

  My second summer here was the sixth summer of our love—and the last of our happiness. Carrying my child and loving her father, I sat on the beach, dug holes in the sand, and let my thoughts wander. I thought about our life in my country before we were married: four years in the cozy flat, precarious on top of a roof in a Georgian square: his meeting me at the bus stop when I came back from work; Sundays when it did not rain and we sat in the park with our newspapers; late nights at the movies. I thought of those things and missed them, but with no great sense of loss. It was as though they were all there to be called upon, to be lived again whenever we wanted.

  I looked out to sea and, now I realize, I was trying to work out my coordinates. I thought a lot about the water and the sand as I sat there watching them meet and flirt and touch. I tried to understand that I was on the edge, the very edge of Africa; that the vastness ahead was nothing compared to what lay behind me. But even though I’d been there and seen for myself its never-ending dusty green interior, its mountains, the big sky, my mind could not grasp a world that was not present to my senses. I could see the beach, the waves, the blue beyond, and cradling them all, my baby.

  I sat with my hand on my belly and waited for the tiny eruptions, the small flutterings that told me how she lay and what she was feeling. Gradually we came to talk to each other. She would curl into a tight ball in one corner of my body until, lopsided and uncomfortable, I coaxed and prodded her back into a more centered, relaxed position. I slowly rubbed one corner of my belly until there, aimed straight at my hand, I felt a gentle punch. I tapped and she punched again. I was twenty-nine. For seventeen years my body had waited to conceive, and now my heart and mind had caught up with it. Nature had worked admirably; I had wanted the child through my love for her father, and how I loved her father that summer. My body could not get enough of him. His baby was snug inside me and I wanted him there too.

  From where I stand now, all I can see is dry, solid white. The white glare, the white wall, and the white path, narrowing in the distance.

  I should have gone. No longer a serrating thought but familiar and dull. I should have gone. In that swirl of amazed and wounded anger when, knowing him as I did, I first sensed that he was pulling away from me, I should have gone. I should have turned, picked up my child, and gone.

  I turn. The slatted blinds are closed against a glaring sun. They call the wooden blinds sheesh and tell me it’s the Persian word for glass. So that which sits next to a thing is called by its name. I have had this thought many times and feel as though it should lead me somewhere, as though I should draw some conclusion from it, but so far I haven’t.

  I draw my finger along a wooden slat. Um Sabir, my husband’s old nanny, does everything around the house, both here and in the city. I tried at first at least to help, but she would rush up and ease the duster or the vacuum cleaner from my hands. “Shame, shame. What am I here for? Keep your hands nice and soft. Go and rest. Or why don’t you go to the club. What have you to do with these things?” My husband translated all this for me and said things to her which I came to understand meant that tomorrow I would get used to their ways. The meals I planned never worked out. Um Sabir cooked what was best in the market on that day. If I tried to do the shopping the prices trebled. I arranged the flowers, smoothed out the pleats in the curtains, and presided over our dinner parties.

  My bed is made. My big bed into which a half-asleep Lucy, creeping under the mosquito net, tumbles in the middle of every night. She fits herself into my body and I put my arm over her until she shakes it off. In her sleep she makes use of me; my breast is sometimes her pillow, my hip her footstool. I lie content, glad to be used. I hold her foot in my
hand and dread the time—so soon to come—when it will no longer be seemly to kiss the dimpled ankle.

  On a black leather sofa in a transit lounge in an airport once, many years ago, I watched a Pakistani woman sleep. Her dress and trousers were a deep yellow silk, and on the dress bloomed luscious flowers in purple and green. Her arms were covered in gold bangles. She had gold in her ears and in her left nostril, gold around her neck. Against her body her small son lay curled. One of his feet was between her knees, her nose was in his hair. All her worldly treasure was on that sofa with her, and so she slept soundly on. That image too I saved up for him.

  I made my bed this morning. I spread my arms out wide and gathered in the soft, billowing mosquito net. I twisted it around in a thick coil and tied it into a loose loop that dangles gracefully in midair.

  Nine years ago, sitting under my first mosquito net, I had written: “Now I know how it feels to be a memsahib.” That was in Kano, deep, deep in the heart of the continent I now sit on the edge of. I had been in love with him for three years, and being apart then was merely a variant of being together. When we were separated, there was for each a gnawing lack of the other. We would say that this confirmed our true, essential union. We had parted at Heathrow, and we were to be rejoined in a fortnight in Cairo, where I would meet his family for the first time.

  I had thought to write a story about those two weeks; about my first trip into Africa: about Muhammad al-Senusi explaining courteously to me the inferior status of women, courteously because, being foreign, European, on a business trip, I was an honorary man. A story about traveling the long, straight road to Maiduguri and stopping at roadside shacks to chew on meat that I then swallowed in lumps while Senusi told me how the meat in Europe had no body and melted like rice pudding in his mouth. About the time I saw the lion in the tall grass. I asked the driver to stop, jumped out of the car, aimed my camera, and shot as the lion crouched. Back in the car, unfreezing himself from horror, the driver assured me that the lion had crouched in order to spring at me. I still have the photo: a close-up of a lion crouching in tall grass. I look at it and cannot make myself believe what could have happened.