Nekropolis (27 page)

The woman who meets me at the door says, “You must be Miss Hariba.” Her name is Isabella and she looks very Spanish. I feel small and dark next to her. There are seven women and one man working at the daycare. Miss Isabella has me set out juice and breakfast sweets for the thirty children who are coming. They come in dribs and drabs, their heads on the shoulders of fathers dressed for work or hand in hand with mothers in suits. They know how things work here. Some of them come up for juice. I say hello to the ones who do, and some say hello, some just take the juice and the sweet and wander off to Miss Isabella or one of the other caregivers. Miss Isabella is surrounded by children. She sits on the floor and they sit against her knees or her side, or reach over to pull on her sleeve. I can’t understand them because they lisp in Spanish, but I recognize the insistence when they say, “Miss Isabella. Miss Isabella.” They all want to tell Miss Isabella something.

I sit down and wait to be told what to do.

There are places all over the daycare where there are things to do and part of the day the children have to do simple tasks. Part of the day they have unstructured play and if the weather is good, they can go outside. Part of the day they do things in groups. First this morning they have to listen to Miss Isabella tell them a story and she does. It’s a long story about a girl who lives in India and things she does in her day, but I don’t speak enough Spanish to understand it. Miss Isabella keeps smiling at the children and at me as she tells it and I smile and nod back as if I understand. After she finishes, the children all take out their slates and whisper the story to it. This is one of their tasks, that they have to listen and then say what they heard.

Listening hard to the story makes my head ache. There are a lot of words I don’t understand, and the verbs are especially difficult for me. My eyes feel heavy, and the sound of children whispering makes me even sleepier.

After the story, five of the children and I go and make bead necklaces. Miss Isabella takes us over. “Here are beads,” she says. There are bins of beads. Big wooden beads and little stone and plastic beads, lots of colors, and some are smooth and some are bumpy. People in Spain have so much money that they can let children have these things to play with. My mother spends less on paper for wreaths than it costs people to bring their children to this daycare to make necklaces.

I hand out string and we sit down on the floor with the beads. I don’t know what to do, but the children do.

“Show me,” I say.

“Get a piece of string,” says one.

“Miss Hariba,” says a little girl, and then she tells me to do something, holding her string out to me. I don’t understand.

She says it again.

Miss Isabella is taking five children out to the garden. Everyone else is busy.

The children are all holding their strings out to me. Finally one little boy tries to make a knot in his string and I realize what they want and I tie knots in all their strings.

“Miss Hariba, look!”

I look, I
ohhh
and
ahhh
. I make mine of blue and yellow beads alternating, with a couple of big beads for emphasis. Am I supposed to try to teach them about patterns? I let them do whatever they want, and one boy makes his like mine, only black and red, but the other four do whatever they want.

“Look at mine.”

Then one little girl wants me to wear hers, so I tie it around my neck. Then I have to wear everybody’s. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to.

We’re done before anyone else is done with their tasks. “Can we go garden?”

“No,” I say. I try to think of what else to do. I tie another string for everyone and we make another one. Akhmim is at home right now, not worrying about if he’s doing everything wrong.

That goes even faster. I go ask one of the other caregivers what I’m supposed to do. She says that they need to put the beads away.

So we sort out the beads, but before we get all the beads put away, everybody else is done with their tasks and gets to go outside. My children are the last ones to go outside.

It’s a difficult day. I don’t understand a lot of the things the children do and at the end of the day I’m sick to death of being touched.

The bus is full, and I have to stand. People keep brushing against me and I feel it each time they do. If I were a mother, I would be going home to my children. For the first time, I wonder how mothers can stand it. I think, Maybe if they were my own children it would be different.

Maybe not.

* * *

Akhmim gets a job serving in a restaurant. He is gone when I get home from work, and it seems as if I never see him.

Miss Katrina tells me that we’re doing very well. I’m getting better at Spanish, although it seems to me that the only people I ever talk to are children.

I come home at night and get off the bus and go up to the empty apartment. There’s nothing to do there except more Spanish, or entertainments on my slate. I can’t think after a day of work, so I sit on the cushions and play games on my slate until I’m hungry, and then play more until it’s time to go to bed. Once in a while I talk to Professor Malik or get a message from him, but that makes me think of Alem, and my chest tightens up, so often I don’t answer when it’s him.

I am sitting playing an entertainment called Opt Ciudad. I like it because I don’t have to know a lot of Spanish, and it’s easy for people like me who haven’t done a lot of things on a slate-some of the entertainments go so fast that I always crash or get shot. But this one is about building a city, and about putting groceries where all the people in the city can get to them easily and roads and highways.

Professor Malik calls and I answer, a little out of guilt and a little out of not thinking fast enough.

“Miss Hariba,” he says. “How are you? How are the children?”

I hate being interrupted in the middle of the game, but that’s wrong. I tell him about the children.

“Did Akhmim get in touch with the chimera whose address I gave him?”

“Pardon me?” I ask.

“He called me and asked how he could get in touch,” Professor Malik says.

“Oh yes,” I lie. “He’s at work right now. Since he works in the evening, I don’t get to talk to him.”

“You must miss him,” Professor Malik says.

“When did he call you?” I ask, trying to sound as if I just forgot.

Professor Malik frowns, remembering. “Monday?”

“Right,” I say. “That’s right. I don’t know if he’s had a chance to call yet.”

“I knew he was lonely,” Professor Malik says.

I think this call will never end.

But at last it does and I sit there, thinking, for a long time, before I go back to playing Opt Ciudad.

I go to bed before Akhmim gets home-I always go to bed before Akhmim gets home because he gets home so late and I get up so early. I even fall asleep a little bit. He comes in so silent, so careful, as always, not to wake me. I think he can tell that I’m awake, but if I don’t talk to him, he doesn’t talk to me.

I should talk to him. I should ask him about it. But I know he has an answer and I can’t ask him. I’m afraid of what he’ll say, and what I’ll believe.

* * *

It’s like having a sore tooth, this idea of other
harni
. I worry at it and worry at it.

On Friday I work, and on Saturday I can stay in bed late, so I don’t have to go to bed so early. I plan to stay up late. I want to talk to Akhmim. Of course, by Friday evening I’m so tired I think I’ll never be able to stay up and at ten I go to bed. But I can’t sleep. Akhmim didn’t tell me he had called Professor Malik.

I’m going to ask him on Saturday.

I can’t sleep and I’m still awake when Akhmim gets home.

He’s quiet as a cat. When he gets into bed, I can smell his smell, and the smell of restaurant.

He never kisses me. We’re like brother and sister. Maybe that’s what he needs.

“Akhmim?”

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

I don’t know. “I miss you,” I say.

“I miss you,” he says.

“Do you remember how we used to sit in my room at Mbarek’s and talk?”

“I remember,” he says. He rises up on one elbow, barely visible in the faint glow of the nightlight in the hallway. “Are you sad, Hariba?”

“I am,” I say. “I really am. I feel so bad about Alem. It’s so hard here. It’s harder than I ever thought it would be.”

He leans over and kisses me on the forehead. I lift my face and he kisses me on the lips. I love when he kisses me.

“Kiss me more,” I whisper.

He kisses me more, and I put my hand on his chest. What do people do when they want to make love? I put my arm around him, tentative. Doesn’t the man usually do that? But I’ve never wanted to do more than kiss with Akhmim. It’s like I’ve told him not to go any further, so now I have to show him.

He puts his arm around me and draws me close.

I’m so nervous. I’ve never seen him naked. I’ve never let him see me naked. Years ago, when Nouzha and I had talked, before I found out she was committing adultery with my brother Fhassin, she told me that the first time it hurt. I asked Ayesha after she got married and she said it was true, but then it got better.

Did Nouzha have to go through that again with Fhassin? Does it hurt at first with every man? Or just with the first man?

Akhmim strokes my back. It feels good. I don’t know what to do, though, since he has me pressed against him and I have one arm around him. Surely, if this is what he wants, he’ll take it. He kisses my jaw and my neck. It’s like one of the entertainments that the mistress used to watch.

He lays me on my back and kisses me some more, and then strokes my breast through my nightgown and I startle.

He stops.

“It’s all right,” I say.

“Shh,” he says, and kisses me some more. He doesn’t touch my breasts, though. Is he supposed to? O Allah, what am I doing?

I’m supposed to wait until I marry. Will I ever be able to marry if I do this? Is Akhmim who I want to marry? Yes, I tell myself, I am already in love with Akhmim and I came all the way to Spain because of that love. (But the counselor’s voice is in my head, telling me that our relationship isn’t right.)

Akhmim lies down next to me and strokes my forehead.

“Are you tired?” I ask.

“A little,” he says.

“Me too,” I say.

“I love you,” he says. And I didn’t even ask him to.

He holds me against him until finally I’m too hot and I stretch out and fall asleep.

* * *

Saturday morning I’m all jittery. If he were a man, he wouldn’t have stopped. Is it my fault? Is it Allah’s will, protecting me?

I want to ask him if he
wants
to have sex. I want to ask him if he wants to marry me, but I’m not supposed to ask, he is. Maybe this is what the counselor meant about having to resolve my relationship with Akhmim. Maybe I have to learn different ways because he’s a
harni
.

Instead, I say, “I talked to Professor Malik, and he told me you called and asked how to get in touch with a
harni
.”

I want it to sound just curious, but it comes out sounding irritated.

Akhmim shrugs. “My counselor told me I should talk to another chimera.”

Chimera,
I think.
Harni
is a bad word.

“Did you call?” I ask.

Akhmim looks at me for a moment. “No,” he says.

“Why not?” I ask.

He says, watching me steadily the way he always does, “I was busy. It’s you I need.”

“If your counselor says you should, then you should.”

“Okay,” he says.

He comes over to me and hugs me, and strokes my hair. “This is hard for you, all this change.”

Normally I would just let him, but now it strikes me that he’s doing this to change the subject.

“I think you should call,” I say. “Why don’t you call now? Maybe we could go and meet him. Or her.”

“Him,” Akhmim says.

Thank Allah.

Akhmim lets go of me and steps back. “Right now?” he says.

“Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

“I’m tired,” Akhmim says. “I have to work tonight.”

“Just calling isn’t so bad,” I say, merciless.

He can’t refuse me, I know that.

He finds his slate and looks up the number. “Hola,” he says.
“Me llamo Akhmim, yo soy una chimera y un amigo de Professor Malik.”
His Spanish is better than mine. I can understand that he’s said hello and introduced himself as a friend of Professor Malik’s, but I have trouble following everything he says.

Sunday. He says Sunday afternoon a couple of times, and he smiles and nods. I wish I could see the face on his slate, see who he’s talking to. He laughs, looking beautiful for the face I can’t see. Who, I realize, must be beautiful, too.

Merciful Allah protect me.

“His name is Ari,” Akhmim says. “He says we should come tomorrow at two o’clock. He says a lot of the chimera in the household will be around.”

Akhmim’s face betrays nothing. He seems perfectly at ease with the idea.

Oh, my painful heart.

* * *

Sunday afternoon and off we go, taking the bus past the bull-ring and then changing to another bus and then another bus because on Sunday some of the buses run and some don’t.

I’m wearing my best clothes. As if I’m going to be able to compete with chimera. I’m sweating and so nervous I feel sick. Akhmim holds my hand tightly and chatters about everything that happened at the restaurant the night before.

Finally we get off at a little apartment building, only three stories tall, concrete, and old-fashioned. Akhmim knocks on the door, still holding my hand.

The chimera who answers is small and dark, flat-faced and bow-legged. I can’t tell for a moment if it’s a man or a woman, but I decide it’s a woman.

“I’m here to see Ari,” Akhmim says.

“This way,” the chimera says.

Inside the apartment building has been changed so the first floor is all open like a house. In the back there are two more chimera working in the kitchen. They look identical to the one that let us in the door. The one that let us in takes us upstairs, and then up to the third floor.