The Book of Other People (16 page)

If Nigora were asked about the suffering in her own marriage, she would not have been able to talk about it. All her suffering was elsewhere - in the realm of remembered facts.

There was a snobbishness in her suffering, a reserve. It would not countenance comparison.

And yet, and yet: Laziz would go down underneath the covers, in the nights. And he would say to her, ‘Never leave me, never leave me.’ And how could she? she would reply. Everything she loved was Laziz. And he would say to her, ‘Never leave me, never leave me.’ Or he would say, ‘Tell me I’m not ugly.’ For Laziz believed that he was ugly; he believed that he was the ugliest and weakest child. And Nigora, sadly, continued to reassure him; she kissed the galumph of his nose, the crooked line of his mouth, and she said to him, ‘You’re not ugly. Of course you’re not. I love you, you’re beautiful,’ until Laziz managed to calm down.

The coverlet had been given to her by her grandmother. And underneath the coverlet she felt safe.

She did not believe in her own suffering, Nigora. All her ideas of suffering were reserved for the gone, the missing, the dead.

Somewhere, everywhere, a girl is taking her clothes off. This much was true. Nigora could agree with this. But something else, she thought, was also true. Somewhere, everywhere, a girl was being raped. And the question was: how far away? How far away did something have to happen before it stopped being your responsibility? How far away did a rape need to be? Two streets? A country? A separate universe?

In this rational hysteria lived Nigora, who loved her husband, Laziz - a taxi driver and former businessman. She loved him, and wanted to leave him.

On the sofa which they had bought after a year in their new country, Nigora and Laziz watched
The Philadelphia Story
. Or: Nigora watched, and Laziz slept beside her, his head back, his mouth open. This film was dubbed into Russian, with one male and bass actor doing all the voices. And this made her sad; it created a gap between Nigora and the storyline.

As Nigora watched this film again, she considered that its plot was all about timing: everything had got out of kilter, and yet somehow things would restore themselves. Timing would be restored. Because the couple who move apart are still the same couple. The beauty (thought Nigora) of
The Philadelphia Story
is the fact that the film is about Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and yet all along it looks like it is about Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. But Jimmy Stewart is just there to prove a sad truth of timing: that the affair one is having is never the affair one is having. There is always someone else.

The cake she had bought lay crumbling on its paper box in front of them.

She stroked Laziz under his rough chin. She gently extricated his moustache from its precarious angle on his upper lip.
Happy anniversary
, she said, gently, to herself.

Laziz would be picturesque, and she would be distressed. That was the image of their marriage.

She was not sure if the vocabulary for everything really existed. She was not convinced by everyone’s assumption of linguistic comprehensiveness. The feeling she got, for instance, when watching
The Philadelphia Story
, was not quite sadness; it was not quite melancholy. It was more to do with a sensation of size, of overwhelming size.

More and more, she was beginning to believe that feelings were not complicated. They were not split into infinite constituent elements. Instead, often, the words were not all there. For Nigora was pragmatic. She had no time for souls with
soul
. No, Nigora did not believe in the indefinable. She believed that everything had a definition, if only the words could be found.

She remembered her father coming into the empty kitchen, letting his keys splay on the table. She remembered him biting the cap off a biro, as he made notes on a pile of manuscript. She remembered the first boy she ever slept with, Shuhrat, who used to swim while she lay and read on the grass by the river. He got out and lay beside her. She remembered his arms, the hair springing awry as it dried. But now she could not quite remember his face. She remembered his eyes were brown, but she could not remember his eyes. She only remembered that she knew they were brown.

And she missed her mother. In this new city, where Laziz was her one companion, she wanted to be home again. She wanted to be there in the kitchen, with her mother talking. And her father, as she talked, would pluck a stray hair from the base of her neck. There was a bowl of sweets on the kitchen table, underneath a tablecloth.

Nigora was a minor character.

She remembered writing her initials on the condensation in the car window, as her father drove her to piano lessons. She remembered the letters leaking downwards, obeying the line of gravity.

Nigora considered Yaha, and gave up. She stroked the hairs on the back of Laziz’s hands. Where could she go? Everywhere she went, there was her marriage.

The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality.

But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character. She was going (thought Nigora) to
be herself
. And yet: how could she? How could she?

On the final dusk of her life, Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sits in a green velvet armchair reading - or rather not reading - a dull nautical mystery called
Trouble Astern
. Her chair faces a large window overlooking a long driveway lined with oaks. Beyond the furthest oak she can see the ocean and, riding the horizon, a house-lit island.

Behind her is a closed door.

From this vantage point, we cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz. She is blocked from view by her throne-like chair. Glad Parks-Schultz’s name suggests she is as dull as her mystery, an insincerely cheery woman compactly assembled, her bland orb face stacked directly atop her middle like a snowman’s. Her name suggests a curt and stilted manner. We see her barking monotone pleasantries, scaring children unintentionally. There is no sense arguing with this perception, even if there is only a little truth to it. We cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz, we can only hear her name in our heads, and her name has carved a lumpen shape for her there.

Glad Parks-Schultz tries repeatedly to lose herself in her mystery - a love affair, a sailing trip, a cabin, a knife - but cannot. Following the spat over the Christmas ham (‘How can you serve
ham
?’ her daughter had asked, a fair question; Sylvia was a vegetarian, something her mother had willfully forgotten), Glad Parks-Schultz finds herself in a familiarly pinched humor, her Holidays Gone Wrong mood. To go with this mood she plays in her head images from another Christmas, images from
Fanny and Alexander
, the only Bergman movie Glad has ever seen, and then only because Sylvia, a film major minoring in psychology and thus a self-appointed Bergman connoisseur, gave it to her as a Christmas present last year (‘This is more your speed,’ Sylvia had said, not uncritically). Fine if it was. Glad preferred her cultural enrichment free of anguish.

Outside her window (in which only she can see her faint reflection), the tree-lined drive extends to a distant point. It is the trick of perspective, thinks Glad Parks-Schultz, whose face, in the half-reflection in this dying-light time of day, appears longer and thinner than it might to anyone actually seeing her. Glad Parks-Schultz splays her book over her lap (only twenty more pages to go), giving up on the cowardly pair of lovers who have sailed and anchored in a cove, who have rowed their dinghy to the secluded beach, who are sneaking through the woods to a cabin to kill the woman’s husband with a knife. Why the husband is alone in the cabin is itself a bunch of self-reflexive foolery - he is a writer putting the final touches on a mystery book. She wants to ask the husband about this book - not the book he’s writing, but the book he’s in. What kind of mystery, she would ask him, makes you wait until the very end for a dead person? She is a district judge. She is not interested in crimes before they happen. She detests the
why
of most novels, which is the reason she sticks to mysteries. There is no emotional worrying of the
why
in mysteries - she cheated on him; he wanted her money - there is only the outcome, and the intricately explained
how
.

Meanwhile, Glad waits impatiently for Sylvia and her college boyfriend, her son Rod and his college girlfriend, all of whom she has banished from her house in a fit of ham pique, to return from the beach.

But once these people (her children and their temporary beloveds) are out of her sight she feels unseen, and not terribly easy as a result of it. Better to be loathed on a major holiday. Better to feel hated and alive. She is a stern district judge despised for her imperviousness to human context, to bad-luck stories. (‘No Glad-Handing Parks-Schultz’.)

The first snowflake of the season tumbles past the window. Glad huffs. She brushes the spine of
Trouble Astern
and prays for an escape from her tedious self. She’ll take any old diversion from this green velvet armchair - her mother’s favorite armchair, the upholstery warted with burn marks during her mother’s final days smoking in this very chair,
dying
in this very chair. She wants to be free of this Holiday Gone Wrong mood, this overheated pair of woolly mukluks.

This is where, Glad thinks, if I were, say, a less cooperative character in the relentlessly trouble-free
Trouble Astern
, I would set the writer-husband’s peg-leg afire (were he to possess a peg-leg), I would crush the whiny lover’s head with a winch handle. If impulsive violence isn’t part of my character, I could instead (as is the annoying tendency of the characters in
Trouble Astern
) flash backward to some baldly moral exemplar from my childhood. I could allow myself to be sucked backward and molecularly reassembled as a younger, sweeter person, available to be efficiently known by others via some traumatic event involving - preferably - my mother. This is the way of the world, Glad knows. She hears it from the lawyers every week. Mothers are, in some soupy way, to blame for every act of criminality.

Glad rubs at the spine as if it were some tinny magic lamp, promising instantaneous transport to an enthralling past. For the purposes of heightening the intrigue at this particular moment she thinks of this enthralling past as Her Secret Life. Everything has a secret life these days - birds, bees, alphabets, armoires, the characters in
Trouble Astern
- and Glad feels quite comfortable in claiming one for herself as well, even if she’s not entirely clear on what constitutes a secret exactly. If she’s never spoken of it, is it a secret, even if the content isn’t particularly combustible? After all, it’s not that she failed to tell this ‘secret’ on purpose (to deceive, protect, gain financial or emotional advantage, whatever); really it existed as a part of her past person that was inextricable from her current person, and so to know her was to know this about her.

Or so she’d assumed. During the ham incident, when Sylvia had unfairly accused Glad of
not knowing her
(didn’t Sylvia know that Glad’s way of knowing was what looked like not knowing?), she had then gone on to say something that was, perhaps, true. She had claimed that Glad
refused to be known
. I don’t know anything about you, Sylvia said, and I’ve known you for twenty years. I don’t know why you are the way you are.

A person needs a reason to be herself ? thought Glad. But instead she said -
fair enough
. This is her measured, judicially minded parry to every little trauma Sylvia kicks her way.
Fair enough
.

Glad looks at the falling snowflakes, thicker now, ghosting the branches of the oaks. The green velvet prickles the backs of her arms. She squirms uncomfortably, then settles down to concentrate, closing her eyes and straining her face muscles. Pushing her brain backward is like trying to nag a boulder uphill with a feather. She begins with something easy. Where was she when she heard the explosion? She was hiding from her mother behind one of the oaks lining the drive, fingering the bark as she is now fingering her book. The scientist’s house next door, unseen behind a wall of arbor vitae, emitted a cloud of white smoke. The slate tiles from the garage roof scattered through the air like shot from a rifle, growing larger and larger as they spun towards her. A late-blooming sense of self-preservation drove her behind a tree trunk, into the front of which, a second later, two tiles thunked themselves with the sickening sound of axe-heads. Her mother emerged from the house. She noted her sunflowers, decapitated by a low-flying tile. She spied a speck of Glad’s dress, protruding from behind the impaled oak.

Get in here and finish your chowder
, she said angrily. Or did she? Glad honestly couldn’t remember. She was only sure that her mother treated her as if she were to blame for the accident, as if Glad’s availability to be freakishly killed had caused the neighbor’s house to explode.