I Think of You Page 13

  I never wrote the story, although I still have the notes. Right here in this leather portfolio which I take out of a drawer in my cupboard. My Africa story. I told it to him instead— and across the candlelit table of a Cairo restaurant he kissed my hands and said, “I’m crazy about you.” Under the high windows the Nile flowed by. Eternity was in our lips, our eyes, our brows. I married him, and I was happy.

  I leaf through my notes. Each one carries a comment, a description meant for him. All my thoughts were addressed to him. For his part, he wrote that after I left him at the airport he turned around to hold me and tell me how desolate he felt. He could not believe I was not there to comfort him. He wrote about the sound of my voice on the telephone and the crease at the top of my arm that he said he loved to kiss.

  What story can I write? I sit with my notes at my writing table and wait for Lucy. I should have been sleeping. That is what they think I am doing. That is what we pretend I do: sleep away the hottest of the midday hours. Out there on the beach, by the pool, Lucy has no need of me. She has her father, her uncle, her two aunts, her five cousins; a wealth of playmates and protectors. And Um Sabir, sitting patient and watchful in her black galabiya and tarha, the deck chairs beside her loaded with towels, sun cream, sun hats, sandwiches, and iced drinks in thermos flasks.

  I look and watch and wait for Lucy.

  In the market in Kaduna the mottled red carcasses lay on wooden stalls shaded by gray plastic canopies. At first I saw the meat and the flies swarming and settling. Then on top of the gray plastic sheets, I saw the vultures. They perched as sparrows would in an English market square, but they were heavy and still and silent. They sat cool and unblinking as the fierce sun beat down on their bald, wrinkled heads. And hand in hand with the fear that swept over me was a realization that fear was misplaced, that everybody else knew they were there and still went about their business; that in the meat market in Kaduna, vultures were commonplace.

  The heat of the sun saturates the house; it seeps in through every pore. I open the door of my room and walk out into the silent hall. In the bathroom I stand in the shower and turn the tap to let the cool water splash over my feet. I tuck my skirt between my thighs and bend to put my hands and wrists under the water. I press wet palms to my face and picture gray slate roofs wet with rain. I picture trees—trees that rustle in the wind, and when the rain has stopped, release fresh showers of droplets from their leaves.

  I pad out on wet feet that dry by the time I arrive at the kitchen at the end of the long corridor. I open the fridge and see the chunks of lamb marinating in a large metal tray for tonight’s barbecue. The mountain of yellow grapes draining in a colander. I pick out a cluster and put it on a white saucer. Um Sabir washes all the fruit and vegetables in red permanganate. This is for my benefit, since Lucy crunches cucumbers and carrots straight out of the greengrocer’s baskets. But then she was born here. And now she belongs. If I had taken her away then, when she was eight months old, she would have belonged with me. I pour out a tall glass of cold bottled water and close the fridge.

  I walk back through the corridor. Past Um Sabir’s room, his room, Lucy’s room. Back in my room I stand again at the window, looking out through the chink in the shutters at the white that seems now to be losing the intensity of its glare. If I were to move to the window in the opposite wall I would see the green lawn encircled by the three wings of the house, the sprinkler at its center ceaselessly twisting, twisting. I stand and press my forehead against the warm glass. I breathe on the windowpane, but it does not mist over.

  I turn on the fan. It blows my hair across my face and my notes across the bed. I kneel on the bed and gather them. The top one reads: “Ningi, his big teeth stained with kola, sits grandly at his desk. By his right hand there is a bicycle bell he rings to summon a gofer,” and then again: “The three things we stop for on the road should be my title: ‘Peeing, Praying, and Petrol.’ ” Those were lighthearted times, when the jokes I made were not bitter.

  I lie down on the bed. These four pillows are my innovation. Here they use one long pillow with two smaller ones on top of it. The bed linen comes in sets. Consequently my bed always has two pillows in plain cases and two with embroidery to match the sheets. Also, I have one side of a chiffonier full of long, embroidered pillowcases. When I take them out and look at them I find their flowers, sheltered for so long in the dark, are unfaded, bright, and new.

  Lying on the bed, I hold the cluster of grapes above my face and bite one off as Romans do in films. Oh, to play, to play again, but my only playmate now is Lucy, and she is out by the pool with her cousins.

  A few weeks ago, back in Cairo, Lucy looked up at the sky and said, “I can see the place where we’re going to be.”

  “Where?” I asked as we drove through Gabalaya Street.

  “In heaven.”

  “Oh!” I said. “And what’s it like?”

  “It’s a circle, Mama, and it has a chimney, and it will always be winter there.”

  I reached over and patted her knee. “Thank you, darling,” I said.

  Yes, I am sick, but not just for home. I am sick for a time, a time that was and that I can never have again. A lover I had and can never have again.

  I watched him vanish—well, not vanish, slip away, recede. He did not want to go. He did not go quietly. He asked me to hold him, but he couldn’t tell me how. A fairy godmother, robbed for an instant of our belief in her magic, turns into a sad old woman, her wand into a useless stick. I suppose I should have seen it coming. My foreignness, which had been so charming, began to irritate him. My inability to remember names, to follow the minutiae of politics; my struggles with his language; my need to be protected from the sun, the mosquitoes, the salads, the drinking water. He was back home, and he needed someone he could be at home with, at home. It took perhaps a year. His heart was broken in two; mine was simply broken.

  I never see my lover now. Sometimes as he romps with Lucy on the beach or bends over her grazed elbow or sits across our long table from me at a dinner party, I see a man I could yet fall in love with, and I turn away.

  I told him too about my first mirage, the one I saw on that long road to Maiduguri. And on the desert road to Alexandria the first summer, I saw it again. “It’s hard to believe it isn’t there when I can see it so clearly,” I complained.

  “You only think you see it,” he said.

  “Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked. “My brain tells me there’s water there. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Yes,” he said, and shrugged. “If all you want to do is sit in the car and see it. But if you want to go and put your hands in it and drink, then it isn’t enough, surely?” He gave me a sidelong glance and smiled.

  Soon I should hear Lucy’s high, clear voice, chattering to her father as they walk hand in hand up the gravel drive to the back door. Behind them will come the heavy tread of Um Sabir. I will go out smiling to meet them and he will deliver a wet, sandy Lucy into my care and ask if I’m okay with a slightly anxious look. I will take Lucy into my bathroom while he goes into his. Later, when the rest of the family have all drifted back and showered and changed, everyone will sit around the barbecue and eat and drink and talk politics and crack jokes of hopeless, helpless irony and laugh. I should take up embroidery and start on those Aubusson tapestries we all, at the moment, imagine will be necessary for Lucy’s trousseau.

  Yesterday when I had dressed her after the shower she examined herself intently in my mirror and asked for a French plait. I sat behind her at the dressing table blow-drying her black hair, brushing it and plaiting it. When Lucy was born, Um Sabir covered all the mirrors. His sister said, “They say if a baby looks in the mirror she will see her own grave.” We laughed but did not remove the covers; they stayed in place till she was one.

  I looked at Lucy’s serious face in the mirror. I had seen my grave once, or thought I had. That was part of my Africa story. The plane out of Nigeria circled Cairo airport. Three times I hear
d the landing gear come down, and three times it was raised again. Sitting next to me were two Finnish businessmen. When the announcement came that we were rerouting to Luxor, they shook their heads and ordered another drink. At dawn, above Luxor airport, we were told there was trouble with the undercarriage and that the pilot was going to attempt a crash landing. I thought: so this is why they’ve sent us to Luxor, to burn up discreetly and not clog Cairo airport. We were asked to fasten our seat belts, take off our shoes and watches, put the cushions from the backs of our seats on our laps and bend double over them with our arms around our heads. I slung my handbag with my passport, tickets, and money around my neck and shoulder before I did these things. My Finnish neighbors formally shook each other’s hands. On the plane there was perfect silence as we dropped out of the sky. And then a terrible, agonized, protracted screeching of machinery as we hit the tarmac. And in that moment, not only my head, but all of me, my whole being, seemed to tilt into a blank, an empty radiance, but lucid. Then three giant thoughts. One was of him—his name, over and over again. The other was of the children I would never have. The third was that the pattern was now complete: this is what my life amounted to.

  When we did not die, that first thought—his name, his name, his name—became a talisman, for in extremity, hadn’t all that was not him been wiped out of my life? My life, which once again stretched out before me, shimmering with possibilities, was meant to merge with his.

  I finished the French plait and Lucy chose a blue clasp to secure its end. Before I let her run out, I smoothed some after-sun on her face. Her skin is nut-brown except just next to her ears, where it fades to a pale cream gleaming with golden down. I put my lips to her neck. “My Lucy, Lucia, lambah,” I murmured as I kissed her and let her go. My treasure, my trap.

  Now when I walk to the sea, to the edge of this continent where I live, where I almost died, where I wait for my daughter to grow away from me, I see different things from those I saw that summer six years ago. The last of the foam is swallowed bubbling into the sand, to sink down and rejoin the sea at an invisible subterranean level. With each ebb of green water the sand loses part of itself to the sea; with each flow another part is flung back to be reclaimed once again by the beach. That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it, caress it, collapse onto it, vanish into it. The white foam knows nothing better than those sands that wait for it, rise to it, and suck it in. But what do the waves know of the massed hot, still sands of the desert just twenty—no, ten feet beyond the scalloped edge? And what does the beach know of the depths, the cold, the currents just there, there—do you see it?—where the water turns a deeper blue.

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2007

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Anchor Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The stories “Knowing,” “1964,” and “Returning” were originally published in the book Aisha by Jonathan Cape, Ltd in 1983. The stories “Mandy,” “Satan,” and “I Think of You” were originally published in the book Sandpiper by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in 1996. The story “Chez Milou” was originally published by SohoSquare in 1988. The story “Melody” was or ig inally published by the London Review of Books in 1 9 8 8.

  The story “Sandpiper” was originally published by Granta in 1994.

  Excerpt from “Sandpiper” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983, by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC.

  “Have I the Right” words and music by Howard & Blaikley. Copyright © 1964 by Ivy Music Limited. Used by permission of Music Sales Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

  International Copyright Secured.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48615-8

  www.anchorbooks.com

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