She thought, it is clear now, it is so clear, he does not love me enough, I am not beautiful enough. I am not feminine enough coming here to ask him to marry me when I should have waited to be asked.
‘Why did you talk to me then? From the beginning, why did you start all this. You should have just left me alone. You had no right. If you were content in your religion…’
‘I’m not content, there are too many things I can’t justify to myself. Of course I’m not content. Isn’t it obvious to you?’
‘Nothing is obvious to me.’ Nothing except that she was rubbing her pride back and forth over barbed wire.
‘I wish I never trusted you,’ she said and saw pain in his eyes. ‘What did you imagine all this was going to lead to?’
‘I imagined a longer time before…’
‘From the beginning, you should have looked at me and said, she is not for me.’
‘No, I couldn’t.’ He put his face in his hands, pressed his eyes and forehead.
She said, ‘Yes, that would have been the sensible thing. Objective and detached, you say. So what do you need from me?’ She had tried to make her voice sound sarcastic, cool and sarcastic but is sounded twisted and childish.
He did not look at her, he continued to sit with his head in his hands. If he had looked at her she might have stopped talking. But there was nothing to check her.
‘I’m not fooled by you. Just because you were kind to me and paid me attention. That’s all. But you would have always been second best… And I don’t want to live here for the rest of my life with this stupid weather and stupid snow. Do you know what I wish for you? Do you know what I’m going to pray and curse you with. I’m going to pray that if it’s not me then it’s no one else and you can live the rest of your life alone and miserable. There really must be something wrong with you to have been divorced twice, not once, but twice…’
It was a sound that stopped her, a movement of his shoulders. It frightened her. Because his head was in his hands, she thought he was crying. She thought she had hurt him enough to make him cry. For a second there was triumph, the crazy happiness of thinking, he does love me, good, he is not immune to me.
She walked towards him to put her hand on his shoulders, to say, don’t cry. She did not stop when he mumbled, ‘Go away.’ She did not hear him clearly when he said, ‘Get out of here.’
Only when he looked at her. Not crying, she had been wrong about that, but looking at her in a way he had never looked at her before. His voice different than the way he always spoke to her. She heard him clearly this time when he said, ‘Get away from me.’
She obeyed him. She turned and picked up her bag from the floor. She found the door knob, she opened the door, left the room without looking back. Down the steps, out of the building, to the sunshine and the snow. Everything clear and cold. Her breath smoke, the snow speckles of diamonds to step on.
15
She obeyed him. She went home and telephoned a taxi to take her to the airport. She carried her suitcases downstairs, knocked on Lesley’s door for the key to the basement to store the boxes she was not taking with her.
The taxi ride to the airport was slow but the traffic was moving, not at a stand-still as it had been earlier in the day. At the airport they put her on a waiting list. The morning flights to London had been delayed and there was a back-log of people waiting. But one seat to London, either Heathrow or Gatwick, she stood a good chance, they said, of leaving before tonight.
It was a plush, clean airport, crowded today with oil-men on their way to Shetland, women with small children, men in business-suits. Sammar’s eyes missed nothing. She could see everything, register everything. Her mind would not think, would not dwell or settle on anything. Just her vision, so much to look at, everything gritty bright.
Airport shops. Sweets for Amir. Something Scottish for Hanan.
Hunger, acute hunger. A long queue at the cafeteria. Vegetable lasagna, very good, a lot of gooey cheese, white sauce. Chocolate cake. Cappuccino.
Going to the toilet. Her face in the mirror, not pleasing, but there was no surprise in that. Wash her hands. I don’t like the smell of this soap. Press a knob and warm air rushes out. Modern technology.
She sat on a green seat reading the information on the screen, Arrivals, Departures, reading it again and again. Feeling the sun outside the window wane. Time to pray and the sadness that there was nowhere to pray in the airport. If she stood up and prayed in the corner, people would have a fit. A story once told by Yasmin: Turks in London praying in Terminal 1 and someone called the police.
Sammar prayed where she was, sitting down, not moving.
In a few hours she would leave. Get away. Get away. Get out of here.
The clock on the wall. Twenty-four hours ago, she did not even know that Rae’s uncle had died. Twenty-four hours ago. Enough to break the mind. Don’t think. Just look around, open your eyes wide.
Time to board. The early darkness of winter. Outside the double-glazing of the terminal, freezing gusts of air… walking up the metal steps to the airplane. Smiling stewardesses, too much make-up, handing her the evening paper. Navy seats, the characteristic smell of airplanes, the fumble with overhead lockers.
Fasten seat-belts. British Airways’ policy of no smoking on its domestic flights.
On the front page of the paper, a picture of the hijacked airplane on the tarmac at Cyprus. Today’s date written on the paper. Today Thursday. Tomorrow was the day she was meant to leave. Just tomorrow. There was really no drama in this flight. No one will notice that she had gone. She had wasted her money on an airline ticket, wasted the train ticket she had for tomorrow. But he had said get away, get out of here.
Take-off, the roar of take-off, the running, running leap into the air. The airplane rose up over the city. In the twilight, the world below was splashed with snow. Sammar looked out of the window and saw miniature houses, cars and trees; the pale frothy sea. Small, compact city that belittled her hope.
PART TWO
… the fog cleared and I awoke, on the second day of my arrival, in my familiar bed in the room whose walls had witnessed the trivial incidents of my life in childhood and the onset of adolescence… I heard the cooing of the turtledove, and I looked through the window at the palm tree standing in the courtyard of our house… I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down to the ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots…
16
She wore sunglasses now. They darkened the blue of the sky, the building that had sprung up in the once empty square in front of her aunt’s house. A cooperative which in working hours filled the road with noise and parked cars. Her glasses tinted the garden blue, its patches of dry yellow, the Disney characters on the children’s paddling pool. She had straightened up the sides of the pool and put it in the shade, filled it with water that gushed from the hosepipe hot. Two hours before sunset and the sun was a spot of blue heat, still too piercing for eyes that had seen fog and snow. Sammar sat on the porch near the old cactus plants in their clay pots, bougainvillea in dimpled mud. Children’s voices and laughter. The sight of them. They were in their underwear: Amir’s pants sagging with water, Dalia’s white, clinging and transparent, and the twins, Hassan and Hussein, in striped red and green. They had soaked the grass around the pool and it was now mud and slush, flat in the shade of the eucalyptus tree.