When one of the men lightly remarks upon her son’s disappearance from the company of the men in the course of the afternoon, she responds before he could. — He needs rest.—
She, Julie, was apprehensive about the family meal after sunset, what had she done to him; would he not — both of them not — be shamed to take part, he among the men, she among the women. But he returned from the mosque with his father, Ahmad, Daood, Amina’s husband Suliman and young Muhammad, and greeted her as if he had not seen her since morning.
Chapter 27
The fuzzy intoxication of being awake when you were used to being asleep and to be sleeping when you were meant to be awake wore off just as the internal clock resets itself after a few days in a country across a date-line. She rose in the cold for the pre-dawn meal and the calls of hunger and thirst were a clamour only by sunset. The transformation of time-scale was complete when she remembered: back there, at The Table, friends had weeks ago seen an old year out, getting drunk, stoned; Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his Danielle had started with champagne and oysters their old life over again on a new calendar. A New Year was yet to come, as time is measured here.
I was taught time was divided by the birth of a child in a stable and the calculation B.C., A.D. that followed ever after the great event. That was time. And all the blacks had been brain-washed by missionaries and battered by settlers into co-option. So they believed it, too. Had to. Well I suppose my parents had some friends — I must have known a few other kids? — who were perhaps Jewish, but whatever rituals they had didn’t count for much with us and they came to Nigel’s Christmas and New Year bash anyway, if they were on the right social level. Muslims — we didn’t know any … but the Indian shopkeepers closed for what we said was the birthday of God’s son and the day we’d decided was a new year beginning — oh I know the cycles of the moon and the changes of season were mixed up in it, but this was the Christian cycle. The world’s just their world, to them, the Christian world.
He was sitting in the lean-to’s only chair marking with a ballpoint passages in a copy of Newsweek he had picked up somewhere when he was last in the capital for an interview with some consular visa section. The pen kept making only grooves and he scratched it fiercely into the paper to get ink flowing. Paused; to regard her.
World is their world. They own it. It’s run by computers, telecommunications — see about it here — the West, they own ninety-one percent of these. Where you come from — the whole Africa has only two percent, and it’s your country has the most of that. This one? — not enough even to make one figure! Desert. If you want to be in the world, to get what you call the Christian world to let you in is the only way.
Canada. The end of Ramadan meant for him that without offence to his mother he could take up again his way to go about applications for Canada. Two letters of recommendation (To Whom It May Concern) based, probably calculatedly and correctly on an unknown’s marriage to a wife with all the right provenance and papers — the wealthy American citizen mother as well as the wealthy father, cited, this time — had turned up from California. Surprise, surprise; Julie handed them over. She would not have thought Beverly — her mother — would or could have found anyone to put his name to them. The casino stepfather apparently had connections among his gambling cronies, though who knew what their signatures were worth. Anyway, Ibrahim put the letters in the file he kept of documents — applications pending, applications refused — marked in the flow of Arabic script she admired.
In another country it would be called up on a computer, not all these to keep.
He thrust the file back into the canvas bag of his possessions. Canada — there were brothers, in the village sense of community, already established; Toronto, Calgary under glittering glass-splinter snow, these frozen places might crook a finger of acceptance to the desert, where sand was grit between the teeth.
She had been allowed, presenting herself tentatively and ready to be turned away with the sisters’ usual exquisite politeness and a stare from Khadija sullenly stern in her abandonment as a wife, to take part in the cooking preparations for the feast of Eid al-fitr. For her, the end of Ramadan meant that the sisters and the children came to sit expectantly in the communal space of the house at the accustomed times for the exchange of English and Arabic.
An afternoon after Ramadan his mother was sitting among the women. She did not speak. But she was there. The die from which Ibrahim’s face was cast. A statement to be read, if only one knew how to decipher it in what endured, a bronze of being beneath flesh drawn from its fine-boned muscular moorings down round the dark elegantly-pursed mouth, creased beneath the brows, invaded by the growth of wiry hairs on the chin. All Julie could make out, in this presence, was she had gained acceptance by the respect of observing the edict that she neither eat nor drink between sunrise and sunset for thirty days, even if she did not spend those days in prayer.
Even had seduced the son again, now in his family home restored to him, in the forbidden days. Did the face of the mother conceal she knew that, as well. He’s absolved: ‘He needs rest.’
This foreign woman gives it to him.
Chapter 28
Sometimes his mood — when he came into the room where she was among the women or in the lean-to amusing Khadija’s and Amina’s children with games unearthed from memories of Gulliver’s garden — showed that Canada was going well. Other days he would glare round at his sisters and desolate sister-in-law as if at a flock to be shooed away, or say to the children in the language he shared with them — goodbye, out, go! — play somewhere else!
There would have been frustration; no news at the consulate, the failure of a promised contact to materialize. He and she did not talk much about these inevitabilities of waiting; there was an unspoken pact of feeling that this would be somehow a way of attracting bad luck, as if some force were hanging over them, eavesdropping, grinning, tantalizing, holding out closed fists — which one? which one? — enjoying a knowledge that the one reached out for contained: visa refused. Why raise her hopes. Why answer questions about what he was ready to resort to, to get them out of this place. Just do it. Whatever it might be. Any day he might find the elegant suitcase packed. In her hand one ticket this time. Week after week passing; the sight of his sister-in-law, the woman Khadija, so haughtily accusatory of the family who had produced her husband, incensed him. Her mannerism of suddenly covering her well-made-up face with her hands, her nervous tic of despair. What the hell was bloody Zayd doing at the fucking oil fields! (The expletives heard at the garage where his wife had picked him up came back to him in their language.) Yes, that’s it. Fucking, he’s found another woman there, and my mother has to feed the grand wife from the capital he was so proud of, my father has to pay and send his children to school.
Who would have thought they would still be here when the wind months came. The rih is blowing.
He comes back from wherever it is the friends-of-friends take him with what they calculate is probably the right sum of her dollars to place in an opened hand, and there she is wrapped up with a robe round her head like any village woman in the street. She smiles an acknowledgment at Maryam: Wasn’t it good of your little sister to kit me out for the wind? She drew the covering over her mouth and nose to show him how well she had been protected from the cutting fury of flaying sand on the way to the ladies’ conversational tea at the house of Maryam’s employer, for which she had now agreed to modest payment.