What is this.
He gestured at the sight of her, up and dressed. He lay flushed with sleep under his dark-honey-coloured skin, black shining eyes shadowed in blue hollows, melancholy or erotic. Here I am.
Here to come back to from a desert just on the doorstep.
Out to buy fritters. Look, still hot. She waved the fragrant disks at him.
Ibrahim was shaving. The hot water came from a kettle he had bought that worked off an extension cord from the house handy Ahmad had rigged up, which also served for the fan he’d bought, and the lamp for her to read by — each appliance could be used only when the others were disconnected, and there were hours when the village electricity failed: cold water, darkness. The paraffin burners were the resort of the household; nobody went hungry, the slaughterer brother had his bath water heated for him by his mother in the customary way, and Ibrahim’s wife, inducted to women’s work now, waited patiently for her turn to fetch his; oil lamps turned the house into a shadowy cave of shelter.
He opened his mouth wide, high and taut, and shaved at the corners under the two glossy tresses of moustache. Open on his beautiful teeth, this was like a variation of his rare and awaited smile. He raised eyebrows in enquiry: she was watching him?
They wonder why we don’t have a baby.
He goes on shaving the delicate area. The aura of his presence that she has known so well from the first day, contracts in withdrawal; she’s come to know that, too.
Who wonders that.
Your mother wants a child from you.
She has not said it, but he sees, he knows, she is suddenly taken with the idea. Another adventure.
What do we want with a child. We are not Zayd and Suliman and the lot. We will be gone. What a way to make a start, you sick, giving birth, a little baby to look after.
Is she reproaching him through his mother.
Are you crazy? And the moment spoken, he feels its cruelty stab back at him. He throws the razor onto the towel, holds his breath and plunges his face to the bowl of steaming water. When he lifts his head, she has taken up the razor and offers the towel. As he dries his face it is as if the whole exchange has also evaporated. Everything as before, as every morning in the existence of waiting; suspended. He goes off to help out at the vehicle workshop that, within the support of the family system, provides a little money (he’s now being paid) and the use of a car. She has come to be accepted as one of the women who share household tasks, and she makes use of her education to teach English to schoolchildren and anyone else in the village — word has gone round, there are more and more who would like to improve their chances in what (he has said) is the world. Sometimes, recalling public-relations-speak over a cellphone which used to be attached to her like the tag on the leg of a homing pigeon, she thinks it’s the first time that expensive education has been put to use.
Chapter 29
The Bedouin woman can be seen only in the early hours. (Maryam, when asked as a matter of casual curiosity from a foreigner, says she must be Bedouin, they have their tents and their goats somewhere out there.)
She goes to sit on the stump of masonry in the hours when he is at the Uncle’s workshop, the father of the family away on the benches outside coffee shops where he conducts whatever it is occupies him, the brothers at work and the children in school. The women — except Maryam, cleaning her employer’s house — are cooking, watching television or praying— she understands: prayer is the only form of rest his mother allows herself.
No-one would notice her absence. Although it is not proper to go about to the market or shops unless accompanied by one of the sisters or, at least, a couple of children, just to the end of the street apparently does not count. Neighbours, who drop in and out of the family house to visit, are accustomed to her presence among them and greet her if they see her pass; a corner of curtain may be lifted, dropped again: she cannot be going anywhere or to do anything of interest; this direction of the street ends in the desert.
She wears an old khaki hat from camping days with the EL-AY Café crowd which fortunately she dropped into the elegant suitcase when looking around for what just might be useful, before she left the cottage and all non-essentials. The heat tends to collect beneath the dark green cotton brim, adequate protection where she came from, but not here; when she reached her place on the relic of a habitation she would take out of her shirt pocket a sleazy scarf bought in the market and drape it over the hat to her shoulders — people here knew that the sun was an enemy not to be exposed to as a sensuous benefice on Cape Town beaches. The Bedouin hidden in the wisdom of her black wraps was safe from melanoma, alone with her goats in the desert.
The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing— not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.
What could/would thrust this back into time? Water.
An ice age — if that were to come. Water is a lost memory: memory the passing proof of time’s existence.
Ice to cover the sands and melt them back into time with its own melting, over millennia. Drinking an ice age; after the ages when all life-juices had dried away to purity — only that which is inactive can attain purity. Nullity is purity; detachment from the greedy stirring of growth. Eternity is purity; what lasts is not alive.
When the ice age melts, this will be forced to become again: become the vast grassland it was how many thousand years ago?
Buried under sand the insistence of a broken line of words surfaces to disturb her quiet mind … ‘and she conceived … and retired with him to a far-off place.’
She woke, and with her arm limply open-palmed flung across his breast, eyes still closed, smiling, mumbled something.
I dreamed green.
He doesn’t ask what she does with herself all day — the English lessons, all right … He did not know of her hours with the desert; she didn’t tell him, because he avoided, ignored, shunned the desert. (Are you crazy?)
Yes green. If we don’t get out of here soon she won’t stand it much longer, this dusty hell of my place. She’ll go back there. The big trees round her cottage. The grass a black man came to cut. Her kind; that Café. The beautiful terrace for lunch on Sunday. Permanent Residence: so many applications, so many ways, any kind of way, tried, for that status anywhere. Anywhere but here. If she had been one of the ways snatched at when he gave his smile in response to her attraction to him that day in the garage (or was it only on the street), if she had failed him, failed the influence he had counted on through her secure status of birth, whiteness, family position, money, if it didn’t achieve any right for his Permanent Residence in her country — she had come (didn’t she say it) all the way with him; the way of refusal, failure, buried back here in the cursed village in the sand, his home, that claimed him. Love. He had to believe it, existing in her. He felt something unwanted, something it was not necessary, no obligation on a penniless illegal to feel for one of those who own the world, can buy a ticket, get on a plane, present a passport and be welcomed back into that world any time, she will go, with tears and embraces, one last wonderful coupling on the iron bed, any week now; he felt responsibility — that’s it — responsibility for her. Though he had none; he had not wanted her to come here, she would not let go of him and he could hardly have told her that her purpose in his life was ended. So he even married her; had to, couldn’t take her to his mother as if she were some whore he’d picked up in his loneliness; if he brought his mother, who deserved everything, an obviously high-class wife (even if a foreigner outside the Faith), this was at least some mark of her son’s worth recognized where he wandered.