I Think of You Page 7

  Asya’s arrival broke the deadlock. It was obvious her mother-in-law would wish for a word with her in private, and since Hussein was in the living room and Mira was in the bedroom, it was now possible for Souma Hanim to retire with grace and tact and go check on her pregnant daughter.

  “Anyway,” Adila Hanim says, putting the lid firmly on the simmering casserole and grinding pepper into the butter heating for the rice, “I’m going to give him a few words when he gets here today. And Hussein intends to speak to him too. It’s true Hussein’s only his younger brother, but circumstances force our hand.”

  “He might not be coming, Tante, you know—”

  “He’s coming, dear. I’ve told him.”

  Mira appears in the kitchen doorway. Mira is seven months married and five months pregnant, and this, she feels, gives her an advantage over her senior sister-in-law, who has been married for five years and has only a miscarriage to her name. Her importance had become evident to her not so much when she first learned she was pregnant or when her tummy began to swell and her breasts to grow tender, but when she felt the baby kick inside her. She knew then that she was in possession of an immense and secret power. When she lay in bed that night and the baby celebrated the freedom afforded to it by this position, she reached for her husband’s hand and placed it—to his delight and wonder—on her gently thumping belly. At that moment, as far as she was concerned, he relinquished his priority position in the household: baby came first; she, the bearer, came second; and her husband came last. No wonder, then, that she who used to jump up so eagerly could now sit back and let her mother-in-law remove her empty glass of tea, take it to the kitchen and wash it. No wonder that she could sit placidly, hand on stomach, vaguely aware of her husband fixing his own supper tray in the kitchen. And no wonder again that—feeling she had the sacred words, the unanswerable argument that would right all wrongs between her husband’s brother and his wife—she should touch her sister-in-law’s hand, saying “I want to talk to you,” and precede her into the bedroom.

  Asya is surprised because she and Mira met only an hour ago and she cannot imagine that this newcomer thinks she has anything to contribute to this already crowded situation. She glances at her mother-in-law, but Tante Adila is busy with the rice and trying to look as though it were an everyday happening for her two daughters-in-law to engage in girlish tête-à-têtes. Asya follows Mira into the bedroom and pushes the door to. Both women sit on the edge of the bed. There is nowhere else to sit.

  Mira’s eyes follow her own finger as it traces the ridges on the purple candlewick bedspread. Asya folds her hands on her knees and waits. She has not particularly taken to Hussein’s wife. One would think Hussein could have done better for himself than this puffy, solemn girl. He is very good-looking— maybe the handsomest of the three Madi brothers—and knows it; he always wears a gold chain around his neck and his mustache trimmed just so, and he’d always been big with the girls at the club and at college. How odd, after all the jokes they’d shared, all the football matches they’d cheered together in the large, cool living room of his parents’ house, after the firelit dinners, the camp beds she’d fixed him in the north of this country, how odd that he should now be sitting out there, in his brother’s rented living room, with a newspaper, like a stranger. He had not spoken except to greet her and had merely shaken her hand politely when he opened the door. She sensed his puzzlement and also his disapproval. Come to think of it though, they’d never actually had any real conversations, and whenever he’d expressed an opinion—which he didn’t often do—it had always been more restrained, more ordinary, than she’d expected. Also, as far as she knew, he had never ever brought a girl home. She would not have lacked a welcome, for—although Asya distinctly got the feeling that Mira did not get along well with her mother-in-law—Tante Adila was the most openhearted and hospitable of women, reserving her small store of animosity exclusively for Tante Durriya, the wife of her adored older brother. Maybe Hussein deserves his ponderous, silent, doubtless well-dowried bride, she thinks.

  Across the room, by the French windows, unopenable onto the back patio, a dark patch begins to unfold itself on the carpet. It straightens onto four frail legs, steps into a medallion of pale sunshine, and stretches itself thoroughly. Then it rolls over onto its back and scrambles again to its feet. Its nose, ears, bright yellow eyes, and tail are all quivering with alert curiosity.

  “Ah. So that’s where you’ve been.”

  Asya bends and scratches her fingernails on the carpet. The kitten is upon them instantly. There they play, the hand and the cat—scratching, advancing, poking, pouncing, retreat-ing—until Mira, stung by this unseemly display of frivolity, straightens up, captures her own wandering hand, rolls it into a fist, coughs slightly, and says, “There are problems between you and Saif?” Asya glances up.

  “Oh, no. It’s all over. There aren’t any problems anymore.” “But I heard … I heard that you’re going to leave him.” The kitten is on its back, paws raised, waiting to strike at Asya’s hovering hand. Even its belly is jet black.

  “We’ve already left each other—almost a year ago.” Asya, tired of bending, scoops Satan onto her knee. He weighs nothing at all.

  “But everybody says you love him,” Mira says. “I do love him,” Asya patiently repeats, “but not to be married to him.”

  Mira’s voice is impatient. “What do you mean?” Asya looks at the warm black fur on her knee. She strokes its panting side with her thumbs and can feel the kitten purring. Who is this woman sitting here questioning her? Then she considers that living at home in the heart of the family, while all this trouble was brewing abroad, Mira must have heard her—Asya—discussed a thousand times. She very probably imagines that she does know her, that they are indeed sisters-in-law. Yet how can she truly explain anything to her?

  She sighs. “I mean that I love him very, very much, but that over the last few years we’ve grown apart and I don’t think we love each other in the way married people should. One loves people in different ways—”

  She pauses, and Mira cuts in: “Asya, you’re twenty-nine, aren’t you?”

  Asya glances at her. “Yes,” she says.

  And now Mira draws out her indisputable, unanswerable ace. She considers it, then leans forward and places it gently on the candlewick bedspread. “Don’t you want to have a baby with him?”

  Asya shakes her head slowly, stroking the kitten. “No,” she says.

  “No? How do you mean, no?”

  “No,” says Asya. “No, I don’t.”

  After that, there is nothing to be said. But to get up and go would mean that offense had been taken, and besides there is nowhere to go except the living room, where Hussein sits rustling the Evening Standard, or the tiny kitchen, where the mothers-in-law are clanking the pots. So Mira folds her hands over her belly and lies back, duty done. Asya is clearly beyond reach and is probably even going with someone as she had heard said, although Tante Adila always denies it and springs to her first daughter-in-law’s defense. But then, Tante Adila is willing to be a fool where Saif and his wife are concerned.

  And why am I so sure? Asya wonders, stroking the kitten. Am I really so sure, so completely sure that I don’t want his baby? And in her mind once again, the image forms: there he is, the child she had imagined as she lay on the sofa all those years ago, willing him to hold on, to stay in the womb. He is two years old, wearing soft, dark velvet pants and a white T-shirt, his face round and serious and dark-eyed, as in the photos of Saif as a baby. His bare, plump feet are planted sturdily on the wooden floor and he is occupied with something, some toy obscured from her by the arm of the chair he leans against. He would have been six years old now. She hath miscarried of her savior, they said of Anne Boleyn.

  The kitten jumps off her knee and she stands up. No. She walks over to the sealed window and stands looking at the bare but sunlit patio. No. I am not going to start thinking about it all over again. No. It’s over. It’s real
ly over and I know that it’s over. The child is long gone, and the marriage is over, and Saif is all right now. He is over the worst of it. And he’s started having girlfriends again. She can think of herself as an interlude in his life, a nine-year interlude. And she is not jealous of them. Not of one. Not Nicola or Jenny, both friends of hers and each taking great trouble that she should not know—as though they couldn’t believe she didn’t care. Not of Lady Caroline or Mandy or this Scots girl with the creamy skin and the thigh-length hair—Clara, who adopts stray kittens. Poor Clara, who is taking the brunt of Tante Adila’s disappointment and displeasure.

  The bedroom door is pushed open and Adila Hanim seethes in. The kitten streaks out.

  “So he’s not coming then or what?” Adila Hanim is wiping her hands roughly on a kitchen cloth. The lines from the corners of her nostrils around her mouth and into her chin are etched deep, and her chin has never looked so square and hard as it does now.

  Asya feels sorry. So sorry. “But I told you, Tante.”

  “Told me what and didn’t tell me what, Asya? Last night when I spoke to him he said yes.”

  “The word yes saves trouble. Saif always does that.”

  “So he’s not coming?”

  “I—I don’t think so.”

  “All right. In any case, dinner’s ready, so you two come and eat.”

  Out in the living room, the table in the wide bay window— the table where he has his Bohemian banquets of a joint of cold meat, ten cheeses, pickles, French bread, and red wine— is laid for six. Hussein is already sitting at what seems to have become his usual place: at his mother’s left, facing the window. Souma Hanim is ladling out soup from a big white tureen at the center of the table.

  Adila Hanim sets down a large basket of bread rolls, then sits down heavily at the other end of the table from where Souma Hanim is apparently about to sit. Asya moves to sit at her mother-in-law’s right.

  Mira emerges from the bedroom and takes her place between her husband and her mother. And both the chair and the dish to Asya’s right remain empty.

  Everyone mutters “Bismillah” and raises their spoons. After a few mouthfuls, Mira angles her spoon delicately into her dish and sits back. Her mother stops eating.

  She leans over, staring at her daughter anxiously: “Mais, qu’est-ce que tu as, chérie?”

  “Nothing, maman. I’ve had enough.”

  “But you’ve hardly had any of it!”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  Souma Hanim lays her spoon down and reaches out to feel Mira’s forehead. “You don’t have a temperature or anything.”

  “Did I say I had a temperature?”

  Tante Adila is rather noisily finishing the last spoonful of her soup. Hussein has laid his spoon down in his empty dish. Asya feels a soft touch on her ankle. She slips off one shoe and secretly strokes the kitten with her bare foot.

  “Well, what’s wrong with the soup? Your Tante Adila and I are spending this whole trip in the kitchen for you to take two mouthfuls and leave the rest?”

  “Maman, I’m full. I’m full. Ouf.”

  Tante Souma changes tack. “Ah, chérie, take a couple more spoonfuls, darling, for my sake. C’est un bon potage, ça. Tu dois manger, chérie. Tu dois. Même pour le petit.”

  Tante Adila collects four empty dishes and goes to the kitchen. Hussein, who speaks no French, sits silently staring out of the window.

  “Maman, I just don’t want any more soup.” Mira clenches her hands and her engagement solitaire glints. Souma Hanim gazes at her daughter.

  A crash in the kitchen is followed by a loud and scolding invocation to the Preventer of disasters. Adila Hanim staggers in using two bunched-up kitchen towels to hold a steaming and obviously dangerously heavy casserole.

  Hussein gets to his feet. “Shouldn’t you have called me to carry that?”

  His mother lets the casserole bang down onto the king-size Lady and Unicorn mat in the center of the table and— without answering—turns around and marches back into the kitchen.

  He stands for a moment staring at the empty doorway, then with a slight shrug, sits down and resumes gazing past Asya and out of the window.

  “Well then, tu va manger un peu de ce poulet au casserole?”

  The rice is placed on the table and Adila Hanim sits down with a fresh stack of six plates in front of her. The struggle between the complaints rising within her and the necessity of saving face in front of these two strange women—her second son’s wife and his mother-in-law—have compressed her lips into a hard, thin line.

  She starts serving. But as she bangs the spoon against the side of the plate to shake off a few grains of rice, she starts to mutter. “All day long I’m cooking and he doesn’t even bother to show up. Well, tell me. Say, ‘I’m sorry, Mama, I won’t be able to come.’ Since when have I forced him? Can anyone force him? Ever? To do anything? Never in his life has it been possible for anyone to make Saif do anything except what he has already inside his own head.”

  Asya receives her plate with lowered eyes and murmurs her thanks. She sits, the creator of all this dislocation and misery, and nothing she can say can make anything any better. And leaving won’t help either. She can’t leave—at least not until she has finished all the food that Tante chooses to give her and sipped at a glass of mint tea. She has to get out soon, though, and she has to avoid any chance of another conversation with Tante. That will definitely happen if she insists (as she should, being the cause of their coming to this servantless country) on washing the dishes. Tante Adila will corner her in the tiny kitchen and then … and then Asya might break down and tell her everything. So she must just be rude and escape immediately after the tea. Oh, if only Saif were here, he would have stopped his mother at the door and taken the dish from her and scolded her, he’d have talked to Hussein and caught Asya’s eye and grinned at the French remonstrances, he’d have held out scraps of food to the kitten, and Tante Adila would have been happy. Oh, if only …

  Glancing up from her plate, Asya sees that Satan is in the middle of the table. Keeping his front paws at a safe distance from the hot bowl, he stretches his neck and takes elegantly pointed sniffs at the aroma of stewed chicken.

  “Mange, chérie, mange,” Souma Hanim whispers solicitously, patting Mira’s drooping shoulder.

  Hussein springs to his feet, his face dark. “God curse your father, why don’t you stay away from us?” he shouts and, grabbing the kitten by the neck, hurls it against the far wall. Asya stands up.

  On the floor, in the far corner, the kitten crouches, utterly still. Souma Hanim glances up at Hussein, then goes back to concentrating on her daughter, who appears not to have noticed anything. Tante Adila continues to dissect her chicken wing.

  “What have you done?” Asya tries to keep her voice low. “You’ve broken him. You’ve broken his back.”

  Hussein sits down and puts his elbows squarely on the table. Asya runs around the table toward the kitten. She bends over, not daring to touch it in case it slumps broken in her hand. Slowly and shakily, Satan gets up. He stands on trembling legs, shakes himself; then with a jaunty little leap, he is out of the room. Asya collects her handbag.

  “Where are you going, child? Come and finish your food.”

  “No. Thank you, Tante Adila, no. What has the kitten done that Hussein should throw him at the wall like that? That’s shameful, taking it out on a kitten. What has he done? I’m going, Tante. I’m sorry.”

  Asya is close to tears. She drives round to Blake’s Hotel. She asks for her husband at the desk and then paces while she waits. He comes down smiling, in a pale cream cotton shirt and a maroon cravat, with a question in his eyes. What is the question? Is it merely “Why are you here?” Or is it “Now that you have seen what you are doing to your Tante Adila, are you thinking of coming back?”

  “Hi,” she says. “Look, it’s wrong to leave that kitten there. Tante doesn’t like him and Hussein is treating him badly.”

  “Th
e cat?” He looks blank. “It’s only for a couple of days.”

  “In a couple of days he could be dead.”

  Saif smiles. “Hussein is going to murder a kitten?”

  “He threw him across the room just now and practically broke his back. I don’t think you should leave him there.”

  “I can’t bring a kitten to a hotel. It’s only a couple of days.”

  His voice has hardened in that way she knows so well. He is both bored and unyielding. She knows what he is thinking; he’s thinking, Here’s another attack of the dramatics, another of the theatrical fits. Well, he can think what he pleases; he’s well out of it now, isn’t he? She feels the tears rising to her eyes and knows that she has lost.

  “Clara will be miserable if something happens to him,” she says.

  Saif reaches in his pocket and takes out a pack of Roth-mans. “You’re concerned for Clara?” he asks.

  The tears spill from her eyes and Asya turns away. She’ll take the kitten. She’ll go back and pick him up and take him away. It isn’t right to leave Satan with those people. It simply isn’t right.

  Chez Milou

  Milou sits behind the cash desk. There is a gray-checked rug on her knees and on the rug sits Athène. Athène is a comfortable dachshund the color of expensive leather. She is sleek and plump, but there’s no doubt that she is growing old; you can see it in her eyes. Occasionally she ventures onto the floor and pauses briefly amidst the feet of the waiters. But then Milou gets anxious and leans over to look and call for her, and Athène hurries back. She has to be helped onto her mistress’s knee by one of the waiters—usually old Sayim the Nubian. All day long Milou cuddles Athène. Milou’s manicured fingers have thickened, but she still wears her grandmother’s heavy Russian rings. Her hands are mottled with liver spots, and they are uncertain on the cash register. They are heavy on Athène’s back, stroking her smooth length, fondling the drooping ears, or scratching the worried brow as the old dog whimpers quietly.