“Brilliant,” says Bella. “I look forward to it.”
As soon as she hangs up, Bella realizes that she has forgotten to tell Gunilla the address. She is about to ring her back when she remembers that, of course, Gunilla knows where it is. She has been here with Aar. Bella smiles to herself — she’s not the only one with a secret life.
Bella brings the carryall with Aar’s personal effects into the house. She puts the laptop on the desk in the study and plugs it in so that it can charge. She puts the rest of his things back in the carryall, which she hides under the bed. Then she goes downstairs and makes herself a bowl of spaghetti with plain tomato sauce.
When she is finished, she goes back upstairs and sits down in front of the laptop. She guesses at the password, trying various combinations of Aar’s pet names for her, Gacalisissima1, Nuurkayga3, Gabar, Gu’, TobanKaroon! She tries the date of her birth. After a few attempts, she hits on the right combination.
As she waits for the desktop to appear, something inside her goes very quiet. For a moment, she feels as if her heart were about to stop pumping blood to her head. It’s as if she has crossed the boundary between herself and Aar by accessing his private life without his permission. This is an infringement she would never have allowed herself while he was alive. What makes it kosher now that he is dead?
Bella hears a quick rat-a-tat knock downstairs. The time has passed more quickly than she thought. Gunilla is at the door, her idling car behind her. She says she will wait for Bella in the car. As she turns to leave, Bella notices that Gunilla is wearing the necklace that is the twin of her own, the one Aar got for them both.
She goes upstairs and turns off the computer, puts it in her room under the mattress. Now that she knows how to get in, there will be time to venture further later. She locks the bedroom door, shuts off the lights, sets the alarm, and locks the door to the house.
—
On the way to the shopping center, Gunilla speaks of her own delight at having met Bella. “Only I wish the circumstances were different,” she says.
“It can’t be helped.”
Indeed, Gunilla says, they almost met once.
“When was that?” asks Bella.
“Remember when you came to spend a few days with Aar in Istanbul?” Gunilla continues without waiting for a confirmation. “I was due to arrive from Stockholm two hours after he escorted you to the airport for your departure. He dropped you off and waited for me to arrive.”
Secretive Aar! “I was there when he bought that necklace,” Bella says.
“And did he tell you to whom he was giving it?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“You were not curious enough, you mean?”
“He was a very private man, Aar,” Bella says carefully. “I think you too would have found it unbecoming to ask him questions of that nature if you had known and loved him as much as I knew and loved him.”
There is a silence, a silence that indicates that they have arrived at a sort of T junction in their conversation, no way forward, only to the sides.
Gunilla says, “How have the children been?”
“We’re okay when it’s just us,” says Bella. “But as Sartre says, ‘Hell is other people.’ When others are around us, there is turbulence.”
As if intuiting which “others” Bella is referring to, Gunilla says, “By the way, we had a three-way conference call at Valerie’s insistence, involving me, Valerie, and the Ugandan lawyer representing her. She wanted to enlist our help in a new idea she has: a trust in the name and for the benefit of the children, to be set up with UN help. Naturally, she suggested that she, as the surviving parent, be appointed as the trustee. She spoke at length about her business savvy, managing what amounts to millions of rupees — not that millions of rupees is that much.”
Bella says nothing, wondering to herself why Gunilla thinks this will be of interest to her. But, as a Swede and a UN bureaucrat, she is just being thorough. Or at least Bella hopes that is the reason.
“And you know what I also found out today?”
“What?”
Gunilla is pleased with herself. “The penny has finally dropped. Valerie has no legal right to the children or to Aar’s estate. One: because their marriage in England was out of community of property. Two: by abandoning the family, Valerie did not share a conjugal bed with Aar for several years, which is one way of defining matrimony. Three: you and the children, as per the will in the files, are the only heirs — and her name appears nowhere in it. Valerie knows it too. So this is her new iron in the fire, this trust fund. Apparently, she has charged the Ugandan with the task of getting it up and running.”
“Need we bother ourselves with any of this?” asks Bella.
“Not really,” says Gunilla. “Unless out of generosity you wish to involve her in a trust fund for the children — and I see no reason why — or you allow her as co-custodian, which I doubt is wise, given what you’ve told me so far. This is what I think personally.”
At the entrance to the mall, there is a police checkpoint. Gunilla’s vehicle is subjected to a thorough inspection by several plainclothesmen and some armed men in army uniform. When at last they park the car and enter the supermarket, it is getting near closing time. They divide Bella’s list, and Gunilla goes to get produce and drinks, while Bella gets everything else. Bella gets to the checkout counter in twenty minutes, as planned. Gunilla arrives a few minutes later.
“I know,” says Bella, “that it is never easy to shop on behalf of someone you do not know well. And we have the additional burden of shopping for two teenagers whose habits neither of us knows well either.”
As they drive away, Bella feels triumphant, as if she has accomplished a great feat. Gunilla says, “Having no children of my own, I can imagine how daunting it is to have this new responsibility.”
“Believe me, I’ve gone shopping with them when they were younger,” Bella says, “and without them was easier! At least when Valerie was around. Later, Aar set stern terms with them before they so much as entered a shop. Children are easy when they know where the boundaries are.”
“Have you checked in with them at Fatima and Mahdi’s?” Gunilla asks.
“I am working on the assumption that if there are calls to be made then they should be the ones making them,” Bella says. “As a child, I discouraged my parents from meeting my playmates, believing they would embarrass me. So unless I hear otherwise, I won’t call. They’ll call me when they’re ready to come home.”
“They are lovely children,” Gunilla says.
“I hope you’ll get to meet them,” Bella says.
“I have met them twice,” says Gunilla. “The first time when I went camping with them and Aar.”
Bella had forgotten. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Of course you did. Forgive me for having forgotten. Maybe we’ll do that again,” she adds softly. “I mean, camp.”
“I’d like that very much,” says Gunilla.
Bella feels that if the difference between formality and familiarity is made obvious by a speaker’s use of tu or vous in French or tu or Lei in Italian, then she and Gunilla have now gone beyond addressing each other formally and can assume they share amity, a closeness born out of mutual trust and potential friendship.
And suddenly Bella’s imagination is flying ahead into a future with the children — one in which Gunilla reencounters the children, but not at a restaurant or on a trip, but at a proper meal in that kitchen, where no one has cooked regularly for months. Surely Aar, who had to look after his children on top of traveling a great deal and often working late into the night, had neither the energy nor the desire to entertain. Her mind races with plans to explore the country with the children and learn to love it with them and think of it as her own. She will organize camping trips, visits to places of interest in the suburbs of Nairobi. She’ll encourage them to improve their Swahili and think of themselves as citizens of Kenya.