I Think of You: Stories (15 page)

Your back was so thin; through the flannel nightgown and the woolen cloak I could feel each vertebra. I rubbed slowly down your spine and out and up in a circle and pressed your shoulder and your neck, then went down your spine again. I
could have cradled you like a baby. I could have kissed your head and your hands and wept over you. But I sat behind you and rubbed your back and thought, Tomorrow I leave. Will you still be here when I come back in the summer? I wanted to tell you things and ask you things. I said, “Do you remember when we had lunch at the Meridien seven years ago?”

“You should not go downstairs,” the nurse says at five o’clock as she disengages my drip.

“You don’t allow children up here,” I reply. I ease myself off the bed and wrap my body in the black
abaya
and my head in the black
tarha
and walk slowly out of the door.

In the women’s corner of the vast waiting area on the ground floor my daughter climbs on to my knee. She strokes my uncovered face and I bury my mouth in her small, plump palm. She plants big wet kisses on my eyes, my cheeks, my nose, and my mouth. A group of women sitting silently nearby stare at us through their veils.

On my fourth day, the door of my room opens and a woman walks in. She is tall and wears a long, loose gray garment with buttons up the front and the usual black veil over her face and head. In her hand she carries a covered dish. She looks around to make sure I am alone in the room. “There are no men?”

“There are none.”

She lifts the veil from her face and lays it back on top of her head. “Peace be upon you!”

“And upon you peace and the mercy of God and His blessings.”

She puts the dish on the cabinet next to the phone and settles into the gray armchair. She has a young but not particularly fine face. She wears, of course, no makeup.

“I have brought you something to support you, sister. Hospital food is tasteless.”

“May God increase your bounty,” I say. “It was not necessary to trouble yourself.”

“We see no one comes to visit you?”

“I have no people here.”

As I say the words, I feel tears of self-pity well up behind my eyes. But I blink them away. I can do this much.

“They say you are married to an Englishman?”

“It is true.”

“But how can you marry an Englishman?”

“It is my portion and my fate.”

“But you are Muslim. How can you marry an Englishman?”

“He has embraced our religion.”

“And you live there?”

“Yes.”

“How can you live there? They are all animals there.”

“They are people, like us.”

“They live like animals there.”

“They live like us. Among them there is good and there is bad.”

“They copulate on the streets there.”

“Pardon?”

“There, the people copulate on the streets.”

“I have lived there a long time; I never saw anybody copulating on the street.”

“I saw it.”

“Where?”

“In films. My husband brings home video films and I have seen them: the man goes to the woman on the street, he lifts her clothes and copulates with her.”

“Ah! Those films don’t represent the truth. They are made only to excite people’s appetites.”

“I have to go,” she says, and rises. “But your husband is a good man? He is good to you?”

“Like my own people.”

“My husband is a teacher.”

“It is a good profession.”

“Peace be upon you!” She pulls the veil down over her face and moves toward the door.

“And upon you peace,” I say, “and thank you for your generous gift.”

We had taken refuge from the July heat in the air-conditioned coffee shop of the Cairo Meridien. We drank chilled white wine and ate tomato and white cheese salad and artichokes vinaigrette. Your first play was a rave and people turned to look at you as they walked past. We watched the sun sparkle silver on the Nile at its widest point and we peeled the leaves off the artichokes and ate their pale green hearts and I told you of all the ways I loved him and you listened. Then I told you of how, when I had the flu, he had tended me like a mother.

“He even read me a silly little fairy story,” I said, “to cheer me up.”

Yo u said, “Marry him.”

I said, “But how will I manage never to speak to him in my own language? How can I stand not to live here?”

“Cairo will always be there for you,” you said.

On the sixth day the Scottish matron comes in and rechecks my pulse. She says I should have morphine and should not go downstairs anymore. I say, “But you don’t allow children up here, and I have to see my daughter.”

She says my body is like a compression chamber and every move I make adds to the pressure on my baby.

“What about tension?” I say. “What about misery? What about loneliness?”

“They are animals, these people,” she says, “animals. They don’t understand a thing. They think if they have rules, it makes them civilized. But never mind, pet. You just think of your baby and be a good girl and we’ll have you out of here very soon.”

My students phone me and send me flowers and fruit. They offer to take my little girl to their houses to swim, to play with their children. But no one can bring her here to me.

My husband phones me every day. He has tried to get a visa to come over, but they tell him it has to be sent from this end and will take at least three weeks. “You’ll be out of that damned place then, won’t you?” he says. “You’ll be home.”

I correct my exam papers, and after each question I have to stop to take my breath and pluck at the elastic of my bra.

Outside, after I left you, I looked up at your house—your father’s house and his father’s before him—and it was ablaze with lights. And there in the street, I hugged my old friend, your husband, and the doorman turned away and wiped his face with his wide sleeve.

My mother phones and tells me you have been to America and back, and no, you are not better. Do you think of death? Yo u must do. You must know you are dying. Half your stomach taken out, the needle plastered to your hand ready for your next feed. Your brother scouring the medical depots for supplies, your doctors on twenty-four-hour rotations, your family coming and going and no one ever mentioning the dread name of your disease. All the talk was of ulcers and vague complications and exploratory surgery, not of the removal of chunks of stomach and yards of intestine—not of the disease that maneuvers like mercury, finding fresh footholds as the old are cut away. You must know. Your husband said you did not. He said it was better like this, you would not be able to take it. Is this the last kindness you are doing him, allowing him to believe you do not know? Playing it his way to the end? Letting him off grand finales and anguished summings-up?

For three days my mother does not call. When on my tenth day in this room she calls and I ask after you, she begs me not to take it too badly, to think of my blood pressure, to think of my baby, to think of my daughter. Every possible thing was done. There was nothing more anybody could do.

A nurse comes in with the Sudanese doctor. She stands by as he bends over me. He slips his hand under the cover and
speaks kindly. “What are you doing to your blood pressure? I will try not to hurt you. Yes, you are dilating. We want to try to hurry things up. Your blood pressure is much too high. It is all this crying. Why do you make yourself so unhappy? But it may still be possible to have a normal delivery.”

“Is the baby all right?” I ask.

“You are in the eighth month. God willing, the baby will be fine.”

He rims between my legs three times with hard fingers and a nurse hurries in to listen with her black box at the wall of my belly.

On the back of your hand I saw the needle go into the blue vein. In my hand all detail has vanished; the tube disappears under a spaghetti junction of bloodied plaster. I lie and listen out for the movements of my baby, for the little left hooks to my liver or the flurry of kicks that precedes him falling asleep in a tight ball that wrenches my whole body to one side. He does not move and I imagine him gasping for breath as the cord that connects us fails to deliver the oxygen he needs. No, as
I
fail to deliver the oxygen he needs. I carefully disengage my arm from the railing and rub slowly along the side of my belly, coaxing him, willing him to wake, to kick. I try not to think of you, and as I cast about for other thoughts, I feel the tears on my face while image after unbearable image presents itself to my mind. Five years ago, sitting in the Paprika with my husband when he was still in love with me, he caught my hand across the table and raised it to his mouth. In the car, in the desert, he pushed his hand
between my thighs. I want, I want to be five years old and playing in the sunshine on my grandmother’s carpet. I want to be at my nineteenth birthday party with all my friends and you, newly wed, dancing into the room with an armful of white lilies and blue irises. I want to be home. When I turn my head I see, out of the window, a woman cross the parking lot in the glaring sun. Her black
abaya
billows out around her and she clutches at it and bends forward as she fights the dust-laden wind.

In the dead of night my phone rings. As I reach for it in the dark I try to still my heart, for I imagine each startled beat adding to the pressure on my baby. What more can happen now? A man’s voice, speaking low, calls me by name. An admirer, he says, a well-wisher, one of your doctors, he says. If he spoke in Arabic I could tell which one by his accent, but he speaks only English to me. He says, “I know you cannot leave your bed. Would you like me to be with you? Your breasts are very big now. They hurt you, don’t they? If I suck them I can make them better.” I put the phone down and he rings again and again. I keep the phone off the hook, but if my daughter needs me, if something should happen—I put the receiver back.

When it came, it came suddenly, just as my neighbor—my savior, it turns out—had said it would. How could I, who had been stalked for so long, still be taken so completely by surprise?

On the eleventh day my daughter on the phone asked, “Do you still like the butterfly I gave you?”

“Yes, darling,” I said.

“Will it always be nice for you?” she asked.

“Of course it will,” I said.

“And you won’t ever hate it
ever,
will you?”

“Of course not, sweetheart,” I said. “I adore it.”

I turned my head to negotiate the tubes and replace the receiver and felt a muffled rush as though I sensed a distant sea breaking against rock. As the receiver dropped, I was pushed under by the rushing waves.

Of the time after, fragments only remain. My teeth chattering so hard that my skull reverberated with the sound. Cloth wedged into my mouth, then removed as I started to retch. My stomach empty, but a thin stream of bile continuing to eject itself in bitter spurts through my throat. The wetness flowing from me, whether it was water or blood I never knew. The rhythmic blows behind my eyes that shook my body. And voices talking to me, and hands, hands holding, mopping, wiping, carrying me. And then a room with a fierce white light and Othello and the mad-eyed Syrian and other figures busy around me and a churning and grinding kneading my body from waist to groin and needles going into my arms and back and a voice in my ear saying, “Your husband is on the phone. He wants you to know that he is with you always,” and a matador in overalls and a mask and shower cap braced between my legs and the white light burning, burning into all the pain and noise until an angel in a black
veil dimmed it and turned it away from my face and came and bent over me and I must have said something, for she said, “Have courage, sister. I shall not leave you,” and she held my hand and the ankle of one splayed leg and every time I slipped under that roaring tide I floated up again to hear her soft recitative, her unending verses of Qur’anic comfort.

He fought his way out, my brave baby boy, and they took him away to an incubator, warm and silent and still as I could not be. And they worked hard at me for what I later learned were three nights and three days until at last, as I lay once again in my old bed, empty and clean and calm, they delivered to me a warm, soft bundle. And holding it close, I folded back the flowered wrappings and saw for myself the breathing brown body, the cut cord, the downy head, the long, black lashes, the curled fingers, and my name on the tag around his wrist.

My daughter on the phone says, “Tomorrow we’re coming to get you.”

I say, “I know. I can’t wait.”

“Have you finished your exams?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, “they’re done.”

“Then we can go home,” she says, “because we have to show the baby to Daddy.”

“Absolutely,” I say. “Absolutely, sweetheart.”

In the Meridien, all those years ago, with the Nile shining behind you, I said, “But you’ve been married nine years. Can one trust passion, romance? Can one really trust being in
love?” A shadow passed across your face. “Well,” you said after a moment, “of course things change. Yes, they do. But I think now, perhaps, sympathy—yes, sympathy and tenderness and goodwill.
They
can last, if we’re wise. Maybe they are the lasting part of love. My husband has those. And your man, from what you say, has them too.”

Yo u had everything I wanted: confidence, high cheekbones, a long-running play, a happy—well, comparatively happy—second marriage. I think of you on Friday nights, the door of your lit-up house open onto the garden, the garden gate open onto the road. You move between your guests, your husband, your pets, your children, your mother, your servants. You make conversation, drinks, and food, and I watch you lightly draw the fine-lined patterns that pull so many lives together. My dear, oh, my dear, you made it look so easy.

Sandpiper