I Think of You: Stories (9 page)

When he’d phoned her to say that his mother was in London and wanted to see her, they had both known that Adila Hanim was here to try and put an end to the separation between them.

“If you don’t want to go, that’s fine. I’ll tell her,” Saif offered.

“No, I’ll go. I ought to, and I’d like to see Tante.”

“I’m not going,” he said. “She’ll have dinner laid out and it’ll be hellish.”

So here she is. She had known she’d have to stall on any intimate conversation. Yet she really loves Tante Adila and has missed her—misses her even more now that she’s here. Maybe she had hoped somehow to make her feel not too bad about the whole thing. Well, this was a far cry from the days shared in the Madis’ kitchen at home. The French windows open onto the garden where the three cats snoozed under the
pear tree. Dada Nour preparing the vegetables, her daughter at the sink washing chopping boards, mixing bowls, graters as they were finished with. Tante and her at the table. Tante cooking, showing her how to rub the boiled pasta with raw egg before covering it with the sauce bolognese, how to recognize the exact moment when the pepper sizzling in the butter was ready for the rice. Tante hadn’t thought
she
was a tart for visiting her son, for spending days in their home without her own parents knowing, for vanishing into his room for the afternoon.

“If you love my son,” she once said to her, “you are loved by me.” What would she say now if she knew the truth? Should she tell her the truth? She looks at her mother-in-law’s grieving, betrayed face. What is the truth but every detail of the last nine years? How can it be told? And would it really make this easier? And anyway, shouldn’t it be up to him? This is his family. Let them believe what he chooses for them to believe. Maybe he prefers the cad’s role to that of the injured husband. She looks down at the kitten, busy now with a stray pistachio nut. Poor Clara. Bad luck to be the one around when this family disciplinary expedition showed up.

A little while ago it would have been Mandy. And before that, Lady Caroline. But it was just this gentle, tragic-faced girl’s luck. Clara’s medieval features made Asya think of the Lady of Shallott. True, she had only seen her photo—but she felt as if she knew her. She knows, for instance, that Clara is dreaming of a home in the shadow of the pyramids, of “bonny wee bairns” with brown skin and green eyes. She also
knows for a certainty that within two months she’ll be back in St. Andrews—possibly with a black cat.

Adila Hanim turns and catches Asya staring at the kitten. “Imagine. She’s got a special comb for that cat. A special comb!” She snorts, then shakes her head and goes back to chopping the potatoes into the almost-ready chicken casserole.

When Asya arrived, Adila Hanim had been sharing the kitchen with her second son’s mother-in-law, Souma Hanim. Each woman was determined that she would be the one to do all the cooking, the cleaning, and the washing-up. Adila Hanim—whose mother had died when she was five, leaving her a father and an older brother to look after—because she had never been and never could be in a house run by another woman. Souma Hanim, because she was well bred to an extreme and would never allow it to be said of her that she had sat around and let her daughter’s mother-in-law slave over the sink and the stove. So the two women, trying to work in this cupboard calling itself a kitchen—a fraction of the size of the rooms they were accustomed to—had been bumping into each other, reaching across each other, easing past each other, urging each other to go for a walk with your son/daughter on this beautiful June day; to go and rest in the living room and I’ll make some tea because there’s only one apron, one carving knife, one grater, and anyway, everything’s almost ready.

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 really 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?”