Chapter 34
Almost a year since they arrived at his home. She was fully occupied now. Strange; she had never worked like this before, without reservations of self, always had been merely trying out this and that, always conscious that she could move on, any time, to something else, not expecting satisfaction, looking on at herself, half-amusedly, as an ant scurrying god knows where. In addition to the ladies’ conversational circle, the lessons for other adults who sought her out, and the play-learning she discovered she could devise (probably started with Leila) for small children, as well as the classes she taught in the primary school, she had been drawn in to coach English to older boys who hoped to go to high school in the capital some day; she had been able to persuade — flatter — the local school principal to let girls join the classes although it was more than unlikely their families would allow them to leave home.
She performed such unskilled tasks as she could be expected to be able to do, among her sisters-in-law, in the preparation of family meals. The mother directed everything, she was obeyed as the guardian of all culinary knowledge and dietary edicts, the ingredients she chose and the methods of preparation she decreed were followed. The ingredients of the food were simple but they were combined and transformed into something subtly delicious, the so-named pilaffs and other ‘ethnic’ dishes fiercely spiced in the alternative cuisine favoured at The Table turned out to have had nothing to do with these. Amazing what you could produce on two paraffin burners. Apparently the mother noted her interest; perhaps a sign of other recognition from the heights of her black-robed dignity, began to call Ibrahim’s wife over and show her, with a gesture authorizing her to try for herself the procedures by which preparation of food, as it should be, were to be performed. The mother smiled — Ibrahim’s smile — when she saw how this privilege of her cuisine and lessons were enjoyed. Occasionally she pronounced (like a ventriloquist’s projection) a few words in English; the exchange with his wife’s halting Arabic might in time even extend to conversation lessons in the kitchen? Amina and Maryam laughed encouragement to her over pots and knives when she spoke to them in their language. In the evenings they were beginning to discuss plans for Maryam’s wedding, not so distant, and Maryam liked her to be there with them, translating for her and looking to her for approval, from the outside world, of the style of the event previewed. In projection of the days of celebration both set aside that Julie would not be there, any more, then. Canada, Australia; wherever this brother, who persisted in pressing for entry, again and again, no matter how many times rejected, would take her away.
Leila had her by the hand.
After the child came home from school and had eaten, neither her mother nor her playmates expected to see her. The child slipped into the lean-to to find if Julie, too, were back home; looked for her where she might be reading under the awning if it were not too hot. When Julie went to the house of Maryam’s employer for the conversational teas, Leila (the first time with her mother’s permission requested) came along. She sat silently, nibbled cake silently. Ibrahim’s wife loves children, the ladies enthused; she had never had anything to do with children, not since the Gulliver games, childhood itself — that had been left behind with The Suburbs. There was another construction — perception of herself formed in — by — this village that was his home. There had been a number in her life; she could sum up — the well-brought-up girl with her panda who would marry a well-brought-up polo player from her father’s club; the public relations gal with personality plus, set to make a career; the acolyte of the remnant hippie community, rehash resurrected from the era they had been a generation too young to belong to; experiences, all; none definitive of herself, by herself. So far. Only the day she stood in the doll’s house and showed him two airline tickets.
Leila by the hand. So small a folding of little bones and flesh-pads it might be just some talisman in her palm. Leila came like this with her to the desert. Nobody missed the child. Nobody knew where they had gone, went as the day cooled; when they returned to the house everyone assumed, as the child hadn’t been seen about, the two had been playing games again in the lean-to; Leila loved the games with coloured pegs and counters Julie had had sent from a shop in London, along with an order of books — she wanted Ibrahim to rig up a shelf for her, could he?
Pack them, you will take them with us.
She and the child walked to the end of the street. Not speaking; Leila sang very softly to herself. Their footsteps had a rhythm and counter-rhythm because Julie’s steps were longer and the child took two to her one. Then there was the sand. Muffling; it sank in, between their toes; they left no trail, it ended in the street, the village dropped behind. They sat together, hand in hand — the desert was too far and wide for the child — as the sun, also, left them and such shadows as they caused in the vastness blurred away. Sometimes the stray dog appeared; what was it he found in the desert, as the woman’s flock of goats found pasture; but this was not the place of questions to be asked of oneself or answered. Sometimes the child leaned her head and might have dropped asleep; children have an exhausting life, you only remember that when you teach in school. Sometimes hand in hand they moved a short way into the desert from the stump of masonry, a smooth dragging gait imposed by depth of sand, and sat down, cross-legged both of them, in the sand. It sifted up, sidled round their backsides, her fleshy one and the child’s neat bones. Go farther and even that undulating scarf of sound, the muezzin’s call from the mosque, is taken in, out of hearing. But she doesn’t go farther, with the child.
It is in the very early morning that she goes out into the desert alone; although — she couldn’t explain and does not want to delve, in the dialogue all beings have within themselves — even with the child she is alone in the sense of not accompanied by what was always with her, part of herself, back wherever the past was. The books she had ordered and that had come, once again, in the care of the bus driver from the capital, made her giggle or abandon half-read — that woman Hester Stanhope, and the man Lawrence, English charades in the desert, imperialism in fancy dress with the ultimate condescension of bestowing the honour of wanting to be like the people of the desert. Another game, another repertoire like that in the theatre company of the EL-AY Café, but with serious consequences, apparently, for the countries where the man had been. Nothing to do with her; she wrapped herself in black robes only when it was necessary for protection against the wind.
On their lean-to bed he slept, mysteriously calm in that familiar other lone region, and if he had awakened while she was gone, did not ask, when she was in the room again, where she had been.
Reading, while it was still cool under the awning. Out to buy fritters. His conscious mood was distracted and concentrated: distracted from her, from their doubled existence, and concentrated on whatever new tactics he was in the process of engaging with authority. What they might be, she did not ask either; she was somehow afraid that what she’d been told again and again by Maryam, by the ladies at the conversational teas, would be read in her face: all said matter-of-factly it sometimes took several years before permission to enter another country might at last be achieved. This was the commonplace experience of relatives and friends.