Lovesong Read online

  John touched her shoulder and lifted her hair and kissed her neck. His lips were warm. ‘Time to get up, darling,’ he urged her softly.

  She cowered in the bed, the blanket gripped tightly around her shoulders. She would kill herself and be done with it.

  ‘Come on, get up!’ John laughed uneasily. ‘You’re getting lazy in your old age,’ he teased her.

  She pushed his hand away and dragged the blankets tighter around her. ‘You go to the market.’

  He tried to pry the blanket away from her face.

  ‘I don’t feel well! Can I be ill? Just for once?’

  He asked her gently, ‘Shall I get the doctor?’

  ‘Please, John! Just leave me alone!’

  He got up and put on his sweater over his pyjamas and went downstairs.

  Alone in the cold kitchen he told himself he must be patient with her. He must help her through it. He struck a match and the flame flared against his unshaved cheeks, and he leaned to the flame, as if he peered into a dark place and searched for something hidden or lost. He lit the gas and set the milk on the stove and stood warming his hands over the pan. André's cat came in from the laneway and rubbed against his legs. The cat’s fur was damp and chill from the night. It gave its confident cry and he bent and stroked it and it purred and pushed its hard little head against his hand. When the chill was off the milk he poured some into a saucer and set the saucer on the floor.

  He watched the cat lapping the milk. ‘What am I going to do?’ He looked at the cat. ‘I had a cat when I was a boy,’ he said. His cat had lived to be eighteen. It used to hold Tip’s face between its paws and lick the dog. Tip closed her eyes with pleasure. The cat—it had no name—was a large ginger female with sleepy green eyes. It followed him and Tip about the farm, but never crossed the creek. When he and Tip crossed the creek the cat sat on the bank and watched them go, like a wife waiting for her boys to come home. She would be there when they returned in the evening. He had saved her from a wild litter his father found in the blackberries at the bottom of the pig paddock. His father put the other kittens in a sugar bag and swung the bag above his head and brought it down onto the anvil in the shed. In the evenings John watched from the verandah as his cat lay in wait for rabbits, her body flattened in the kikuyu grass beside the blackberries where she had been born. He watched her spring, uncoiling her body high in the air over a grown rabbit and coming down on it, snapping its neck with her powerful jaws. She brought her kills home and butchered them under the tank stand, bringing a portion to Tip on the verandah, depositing the warm meat in front of Tip’s nose, pushing it forward with her paw. When she died John wrapped her in his best jumper and buried her under the orange tree next to the cattle yards. He wept for her. Tip with her head on her paws watching him. Her remains must still be there. Tip’s was a more tragic end and he did not care to think about it just now. It was too sad. John did not like to think about sad or tragic things.

  The coffee was steaming. His mother had named Tip for the white tip on her tail. John had not given names to his animals. His father’s old horse had been a big lumbering brown gelding named Beau. A great farter. A monumental farter. When his father spurred Beau up the bank of the creek the horse let out a series of mighty farts. Real stinkers. It would take your head off if you were tailing him too closely.

  John mixed the coffee, the smell of Beau’s farts in his nostrils.

  He was thinking suddenly of André's story. André's wife, Simone, was now sixty-five and had gone through her change years ago. ‘She tried to kill me,’ André told him. André was sitting on the gunwale of his boat puffing on his pipe and squinting across the dark water. ‘I had almost closed the door when she swung around and thrust the door open so violently it hit me in the chest and I fell back into the passageway. She jumped on me, stomping me and screaming at me. When she got home with the shopping later, she asked me if I wanted the veal or the chicken for dinner. Not a word about the attack. And I wasn’t game to mention it either in case I started her up again. I had bruises all over me. It was weeks, months, before she said to me one night when we were watching the television, A sort of madness came over me. That’s all she’s ever said about it.’ André looked at John and said cheerfully, ‘Let’s hope your Sabiha doesn’t try something like that on you.’ He laughed and sucked his pipe.

  Lying in Houria and Dom’s old bed upstairs, the blood seeping out of her, the word sullied came into Sabiha’s head. Everything—this bed, their love, their memories, her body. It was all sullied. Their lives. She got out of bed and took a pad and a fresh pair of underpants from the top drawer of the dressing-table and put them on and got back into bed. John came in and he smiled at her and set the tray on the bedside chair, the coffee steaming in the bowls. He sat on the side of the bed and stroked her hair. ‘You’ve never been ill,’ he said, his hand resting on her hair, his fingers spread, as if he blessed her.

  After a minute he got up and went to the window and stood looking into the street. He could see one of the Kavi boys in his store on the corner. They worked all hours of the day and night, those two. They would return to India as millionaires one day. The young man was leaning on the counter by the cash register reading a newspaper. He straightened and put a hand to his back and then leaned again and turned a page of the paper. He was smoking a cigarette and had an open bottle of Coca-Cola on the windowsill beside him. There were no customers. The street was deserted.

  ‘If anything ever happened to you,’ John said, ‘this place would be finished.’ It had begun to rain. The Kavi brother yawned and straightened again and scratched his balls, then he leaned and took a swig from the Coca-Cola bottle and set the bottle back on the sill and yawned again and turned another page of the newspaper. John turned now, looking at her. Her eyes were open but she did not move. ‘Do you think you need a doctor?’

  She spoke from the cover of the blankets. ‘Just please go and do the marketing and leave me.’

  ‘Drink your coffee then, before it gets cold.’ He felt the sadness close around him. ‘You’ll have to write me a list.’ He got dressed in the dim light of their bedroom then went down to the kitchen to fetch a pad and a pen.

  When he got back she was sitting up, her knees raised, holding the bowl of coffee in both her hands, her forearms resting on her knees, her eyes closed. She looked drawn and exhausted. She was not drinking, but was holding the bowl as if it contained a sacred libation, which she was offering to her gods.

  He would have been happy to have adopted a child, but she would never hear of it. It was her own child she had wanted. It struck him then that the phrase the change of life must contain a powerful and mysterious meaning. It was such a familiar phrase. He had never really thought about it until André told him his story. Did it always happen suddenly and violently, as it had with Simone? Or were there signs that warned of its approach? Strange upsetting moods? Fierce blind rages without cause.

  He had an image: Sabiha far off on the edge of a field, on the other side of a high stand of ripening wheat, her head and shoulders showing above the crop, walking alone and preoccupied. Unaware of him watching her. The scene like a painting. The sun shining and the clouds distant and hardly a threat of change at all. My beautiful man, she had called him once. It had been enough in those days for him to touch her foot with his foot under the table in a café for her to sigh and close her eyes and reach for his hand and implore him breathlessly, I want you to kiss my breasts! Would they have to raise their voices now, to call out to each other across the broadening divide? Oh, so it’s you! John Patterner. My God, yes, I do remember you now. Of course. The man I married and with whom I spent all those empty pointless years at that silly café in rue des Esclaves. How stupid that all seems now. What a squalid little ghetto of an existence we had. How trivial our lives were. We filled our days with nothingness. Now look at us. We were always strangers, you and I. It is only now that we have at last begun to see the truth of it. Her laughter at the absurdity
of who they had once been, her physical disgust, dismissing him, dismissing their lives, their memories. Everything worth nothing after all. Don’t touch me, John! Without her, without their sixteen years together, he was nothing. He had expressed nothing with his life. Standing at the window of their bedroom looking down at the young man in his lighted store on the corner, John began to think that perhaps Sabiha’s change of life was going to destroy them. The truth was going to come out and show them they were nothing.

  He turned from the window and stepped across to the bed and sat beside her. He touched her cheek with his open hand. She flinched at his touch. ‘I love you,’ he said. Was that fear in his voice?

  She drank her coffee and breathed and looked at him and tried to smile but the smile withered on her face. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ she said. ‘I would tell you if I knew.’ She had lied to his face. Was there anything she would not do to him?

  They sat looking at each other.

  For a fleeting instant then it might have been possible for them to fall into each other’s arms and beg each other’s forgiveness. It might have been possible for her to tell him everything and for him to understand and to forgive her. But the moment was gone before they had time to grasp it, like the shadow of a cloud passing swiftly across a field.

  Sabiha said, ‘You’d better go if you’re going.’ She put her hand on his. ‘You don’t want to be late.’

  She watched him go. She would rather die than be a barren wife. The thought of her own death calmed her. It was there. It waited for her and could be taken when she chose to take it. Just as her father had accepted the approach of his own death, calmly, with dignity, even amused. And who could say there was not as much meaning in choosing to die as there was supposed to be in choosing to live? Who could tell another what to think of their own death? Death is as sacred as life, she thought. How it might be approached, how it might be welcomed. The gentle, private, final ceremony of acceptance.

  She slept again and dreamed of home, the moaning of the wind in the powerlines outside the courtyard, the great dark bulk of the ruined amphitheatre looming through the dust like a dream of itself. Her father’s house.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Saturday evening and the men had finished their meal. John was running around clearing away the dishes, serving more wine and sweet mint tea, and doing his best to field the banter of the men. The dining room was noisy with talk, the air thickening with cigarette smoke. In the kitchen Sabiha took off her apron and hung it beside her overcoat in the alcove and went upstairs. In the bedroom she took off her blouse and slacks. In her underwear, she sat in front of her mirror and looked at her reflection. She had not turned on the ceiling light but had turned on the small Chinese lantern that stood on the left-hand side of Houria’s old dressing-table. The stem of the lantern was green bronze. It was fashioned in the style of a stick of bamboo, its shade a cluster of numerous filaments of amber glass. The soft glow of the light modelled Sabiha’s bold dark features, making her a beautiful enigmatic stranger to herself.

  She sat there looking at her image in the mirror. There were many things in life the handsome woman in the mirror might have accomplished, but that one thing she had wished for more than anything else. ‘Why?’ she asked the mirror. ‘Why is my child to be denied its mother’s love?’

  She looked at the lamp. She loved the little lamp. She had admired it in the window of an antique shop one Sunday more than ten years ago, while she and John were out walking by the river. They stood with their arms around each other looking in the window of the shop, and she said to him, ‘That is a beautiful lamp.’ Without telling her, he went back to the shop during the week and put a deposit on the lamp. And month by month, he paid it off. Then one day, almost a year after she had first admired the lamp in the shop window, and long after she had ceased to think about it, she came home from shopping to find it on the dressing-table, its beautiful shade glowing with the lovely amber light. On Saturdays after the evening meal she often sat here on her own looking at her lamp, letting her day in the kitchen recede, readying her mind for the world of the old songs.

  She looked at her reflection again. The woman she knew so well. The woman she knew not at all. The stranger in the mirror. The enigma of herself. The good woman. The childless woman. The loyal wife. The loving wife. The lost woman. The defeated woman. The adulteress.

  She sat in front of her mirror in the stillness of the bedroom, gazing at her strong handsome features for a long time, her hands resting on her bare thighs. The sound of the men’s voices from downstairs in the dining room came to her from another world, the clatter of John at work in the kitchen, answering the calls from the men for wine or coffee or mint tea, were distant and unreal.

  It was not until the strings of Nejib’s oud began to sing to her—the delicate serenade of a familiar voice, hesitant as yet, a small voice venturing a modest opening to the evening, melancholy and filled with the promise of dreams and memories, the music of an ageless hope and desire—it was not until she heard Nejib’s fingers caressing the strings of his beautiful instrument that she began to feel the strength of the old songs come into her mind. The music of Nejib’s antique oud and the words of her songs were a blessing in the midst of the chaos of her mind.

  A tear slid down her cheek and she lifted a hand and brushed it away.

  She unpinned her hair, dropping the pins one by one into the little green dish that had belonged to her mother. The only possession she had from home. Nejib had begun to play with more confidence, and every now and then she paused while brushing her hair to listen to him. She was thinking of her father and wondering how long he would wait for her to bring the child to him. The child was still there. It might not be in her womb, but it was still in her mind. The child persisted. It was the only innocence left to her.

  When Sabiha came through the bead curtain into the dining room, the men stopped talking and looked at her. All except Nejib. Nejib did not look at her but leaned closer over his beloved instrument, fingering the strings so sweetly he might have been caressing the cheeks of his sleeping son.

  She walked across to the door without looking at the men and stood gazing into the empty street. She was wearing a dress that reached to her ankles, a heavy woollen weave of deep russet shot through with metallic threads of gold and blue, a high collar of black silk, her hair braided and coiled. Outside it was raining. She watched a car go by, saw it slow at the corner, then turn right, and it was gone. Another car followed the first, its lights sweeping the darkened fronts of the shops, then the street was empty. Now there was only one of the Kavi brothers leaning on his counter smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper, the white light from his store reflected in the wet road like a sheet of translucent ice. The blue light of the television above his turbaned head. His turban a deep maroon. He had told her his name meant poet.

  She turned from the window and began to sing.

  Nejib lifted his head and met her eyes. She smiled. He bowed his head again, his fingers falling silent. She sang a song for him in the silence he had opened for her. It was a woman’s song of home and children. It was for him, for his homesickness, for his memories of his wife and his longing for his children who were growing up without him. She sang for his dreams. Then he began to play again, so quietly at first the plucked strings of his instrument seemed to vibrate in the mind. I shall go home, he had confided to her one evening. When I have saved enough money to buy my uncle’s olive grove and his farmhouse from his widow, then I shall go home. Sabiha had asked him, Where is your uncle’s farm? And he looked into his memories and described for her the view of the Medjerda Valley from the stony hill of his uncle’s farm, nestled immemorially in the shadow of ruins, set among olive trees so old they had not changed for hundreds of years. When he had finished telling her, he thanked her for her songs and for listening to his dreams. When there is no woman to listen to our dreams, he said and at this he glanced at his silent companion, it is then t
hat men cease to dream and become embittered. I know this. I have seen it. I saw it in my father when my mother left us. My father grew old in his mind long before his body was old. I was a boy when I saw the light of my father’s dreams die in him.

  She knew the kind of man Nejib’s companion was and she could not understand why Nejib kept him close. At home this man would have worked for the government and worn a uniform. But he would not have frightened her father. She was not afraid of him either. When she looked at him now he lowered his eyes and fingered his glass of tea, a smile of contempt curling his lip beneath his beautifully groomed moustache. She saw how he understood that nothing of his vice or his malice was hidden from her. To be so exposed to her bold look made him anxious and he could not meet her eyes. That was the kind of man he was. He stretched his legs under the table and lifted his glass and took a sip of tea. It was bravado. He was afraid of her. He despised her. She knew it. Such a man did not need a reason to hate. Hate was in his nature, just as love and gentleness were in the natures of other men.

  While she sang, Sabiha’s gaze touched first this man then the next, singing her grandmother’s songs for each of them, singing for herself. When John came out of the kitchen and stood at the bar, enjoying a moment of leisure and smoking a cigarette, a glass of wine by his hand, she looked at him and smiled. It was for John too that she sang. And as the evening wore on, and she lost her fears in the grace of her grandmother’s songs, Sabiha began to understand that she must go again to Bruno. She would race across the desert in the night, speeding like a mother falcon over the cold white sand under the stars, a mother aroused, and she would defeat whatever stood between her and her child. She must persist. Her voice filled with the spirit of her mood and the men looked at her and were astonished by her beauty and her strength and the richness of her song.