Her thoughts come back to the present as the car comes to a stop at the gate. The guard waves them in, and they park and bring their purchases into the house, sharing the intimate mundane task of putting them away in the fridge and pantry.
When they are finished, Bella offers Gunilla a drink. Compared to many Swedes Bella has known — and even compared to Valerie or Padmini — Gunilla is a modest drinker. It takes her a whole hour to finish her one glass of red wine. “I’ve learned from Aar to enjoy the pleasures of life and delight in the mercies that life has afforded us, always remembering that while we have plenty millions of others have nothing,” she says. “So what’s the hurry? Take it easy. Life is in no rush, so why rush?”
Bella recognizes her brother through and through in this sentiment. “How true!” she says, finding herself once again near tears.
“Since I met Aar,” Gunilla continues, “I no longer drink hard liquor, and I no longer take even wine when I am alone; I do that only in company and only after work. This modest drinking is rather uncommon among Nordic expatriates, you might have noticed,” she says with a smile. “Those among the UN staff who have seen me in Aar’s company say, ‘What next?’”
“What do they mean, ‘What next?’”
“They are wondering if the next time we meet, I’ll be wearing the hijab,” Gunilla says. “I tell them, ‘Don’t be daft,’ because they are daft. After all, Aar was a thoroughly secular man, cosmopolitan in his temperament, very modern in his thinking, soft-spoken and unassumingly humble.”
Now it is Gunilla’s turn to tear up. She rummages in her handbag for a tissue but finds none. Bella looks around, frustrated at how difficult it is to find even ordinary things in an unfamiliar house, especially one in which teenagers live. Gunilla says, “Pardon me,” and she is gone for a few minutes. When she returns, she is carrying a large packet of tissues.
“And here is something for you, Bella, dear,” she says.
At first Bella thinks Gunilla means the tissues. And then she sees that she is holding out an intricately wrapped package firmly sealed with tape. Bella receives it with both hands.
“What is it? What’s in it?” she asks, thrilled and surprised.
“It is a gift from me to you,” says Gunilla. “Open it.”
“I love gifts,” says Bella.
She is so eager to see what it is that she tugs at the tape impatiently. But the tape is stubborn, and she is about to resort to her teeth when Gunilla has the presence of mind to get up and fetch a pair of scissors, whose mysterious location she clearly knows well.
Bella gazes down at the gift, remembering a line from a poem by Apollinaire: “La joie venait toujours après la peine.” It’s a collection of photographs: Aar with friends at a party; Aar with Gunilla and the children camping; Aar in Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and Burma; Aar with Gunilla in Istanbul. Bella has never seen any of them before. And they are good, very good, every single one of them.
“They’re Aar’s,” says Gunilla. “I’ve put them together for you and the children.”
“Grazie, carissima Gunilla!”
She receives the present with out-and-out joy, appreciative of the time and thought Gunilla has put into arranging them in an album and giving it to her and the children.
Bella embraces Gunilla, who says suddenly, “That reminds me. We had a phone call earlier today at the office from an elderly Italian lady. She said her name was Marcella and that she’d been ringing every UN office in Nairobi trying to reach someone who knew you.”
Bella sits up with a worried look. “Maybe Marcella called me on my Italian mobile number, which has been turned off since my arrival here. And Marcella hates e-mails so we’ve never communicated that way. We always use the telephone. That is typical Marcella, seventy-five and still volunteering in a Rome hospital. And you know what? She delivered me. Anyhow, what message did she leave?”
“She said to tell you, ‘Come mai ti sei perduta?’”
Bella asks Gunilla, “Do you know what that means?”
“My Italian isn’t perfect, but I thought she was telling you that you should be getting in touch with her. You’re lost or something, perduta? No?”
Relieved, Bella relaxes. She will call Marcella in the morning. And now Gunilla reverts to more Swedish ways. They chat and drink some more as if one or the other of them were going to go away at the break of dawn, never to be seen again. Gunilla promises that each glass will be her last, but they keep unearthing memories and anecdotes about Aar that they want to share. They page through the album together, Aar’s photos inspiring further recollections.
Eventually, they are too exhausted to talk, and Bella offers Gunilla a place to sleep, but Gunilla declines. “No,” she says. “I’m sober enough, and tomorrow I have to work. I’ll call you to let you know I got home okay.”
“Till tomorrow, then,” says Bella.
Later Bella starts to retrieve Aar’s computer from under the mattress, but she can’t bear the notion of any more incursions into his privacy tonight. Granted, she knows many things about him that no one else knows, but it is also increasingly evident to her that there are many, many things he did not tell her and that there are even things he didn’t want her to know.
She leaves the laptop where it is and goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Just as she comes out of the bathroom, Gunilla rings. She has arrived safely, thank you. And with relief in her mind, Bella sets the alarm and goes to sleep.
15
Today, things are not going swimmingly for Valerie. She is not getting anywhere with her plan to ease her way back into Salif’s and Dahaba’s hearts. She speaks to Dahaba, when the girl is at Fatima and Mahdi’s, and makes an attempt to woo her with the pleasant-sounding idea of a trust in her and Salif’s names. But Dahaba says she doesn’t understand what “trust” means in this context or how it works to her and Salif’s benefit, and suggests that Valerie discuss the matter with Salif, “who is smart and bound to know the legal and other ramifications.” She then adds, “And please remember to talk about the matter to Auntie Bella, who, so far as I know, is our legal guardian.”
It is evident from Dahaba’s choice of vocabulary that she has a better grasp of legal matters than she claims. It’s also evident that she is not keen on taking a position on what her mother is suggesting. She signs off with a quick and unconvincing “Take care, Mum, I love you,” then runs off to join her friends, and gives her mobile phone to Salif.
Salif is very short with Valerie when she speaks to him, partly because it is the second time she has interrupted him during this visit with his friends. The first time she interrupted his chess game with Zubair, and when he went back to the game, he could not regain his focus and he lost to Zubair — Salif hates losing a chess game to Zubair, of all people! This time he is even more annoyed as he immediately suspects that his mother’s latest move is nothing short of a ploy to cheat him and his sister out of their rightful assets. “You are scheming to sabotage the smooth running of our lives in any way you can,” he tells her curtly, “and we won’t buy into it.” Then, just as Dahaba did, he makes kissing sounds into the phone, saying, “Arrivederci, Mum,” and hangs up.
Padmini, who stood by yesterday afternoon listening in on Valerie’s conference calls with her lawyer and Gunilla, is of the opinion that both the lawyer and Gunilla were less than enthusiastic about the idea of creating a trust. In her view, Gunilla, in fact, seems biased in favor of Bella. Padmini suggests that it was foolish of Valerie to suggest herself immediately as the trustee. In her opinion, Valerie should have made no mention of the trusteeship at all at the outset.