Lovesong (17 page)

‘I have seen it,’ he said simply. ‘I know where it will be. Now I am unable to go to my priest and make my confession faithfully. Now I am no longer faithful. I keep us secret in my heart. I lie to God.’ He said, ‘When I wept at your feet, it was from despair. He saw
it then, the old Bruno, grieving for the loss of his virtue. He knew he was lost. The new Bruno, the man you have made of me, had not yet stood up. Now he knows there is no way back to the man he was.’ He was silent again, his fingers absently stroking her hair.

She pulled away and straightened her coat. ‘I’m going,’ she said.

‘Will you come to see me?’

‘No. It’s finished.’

‘This
will never be finished, my Sabiha.’ He spoke easily. ‘Until you and I are finished. It is everything else that is finished. My Angela. My family. I can never reclaim them now as they were for me. It is all lies and deceit at home when my children clamber on me in the evening and my wife looks at me across the room and fears to smile.’

‘Please let me go!’ she pleaded. She was beginning to panic.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He reached past her and opened the van’s doors. Suddenly she was Madame Patterner again. The doors swung back, screeching on their hinges, letting in a blaze of light from the market.

He stood to one side and held out his hand to help her step down.

She hesitated, blinded for a moment, then thanked him, as if he were a stranger who had courteously opened a door for her in the course of an ordinary day. She took his hand and stepped to the ground.

He released her hand. ‘Come on Friday,’ he said. ‘We can talk. There is no one else I can talk to.’

‘I can’t come,’ she said. She walked away. She could feel him watching her. As she was turning the corner of the last fruit counter she looked back. He was standing at the open doors of his van. What did he mean,
I have seen it?
She was afraid. If only there was a place where she could hide and never be found until it was over. He was like a man on the scaffold who has accepted his fate and turns to his executioner and smiles and says,
It was worth it.

O
n Tuesday, just after midday as usual, Bruno came in the back door of the café and set down their box of tomatoes. He said nothing but walked straight past Sabiha and through the bead curtain into the dining room. Sabiha and John looked through the curtain. Bruno was sitting at his usual place waiting for John to bring him his lunch. Sabiha thought of a little boy behaving himself. Not making any trouble. Being good. Being invisible. He sat there, still and silent, looking down at his hands in his lap, ignoring Nejib and his companion. The good Bruno.

John took his meal out to him and set it in front of him and Bruno said, ‘Thank you, John.’

John said, ‘No worries, Bruno. It’s a pleasure.’

Bruno ate his meal and left at once, not lingering as he usually did.

John said to Sabiha, ‘Whatever it was, he seems to be dealing with it.’

She wasn’t so sure. Where was the bad Bruno hiding? The lost man?

The following Friday she went to the market but avoided Bruno’s area. On Tuesday he came again. The good little boy. Saying nothing. She longed to ask him what he was hoping to achieve, behaving like this. How long could he keep it up? It couldn’t possibly last, it was too unreal. If only he had been the
real
man she had mistaken him for, an ordinary immoral man, instead of this innocent. Was he waiting for a sign from her? Was he waiting to be told by her what he must do? Or was it a sign from his
life
he was waiting for? From his god, or his intuition? She had a horrible feeling he was going to come out of this ridiculous pose suddenly and do something violent. His physical beauty made him seem absurd to her now. A god pretending to be a good little boy. He had lost his dignity. She was deeply ashamed to think of what they had done together. Her child, if it were ever to exist, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with that Friday at the market in Bruno’s van.

She was out shopping when John answered the telephone. It was Sabiha’s sister, Zahira. She said she was calling from the box outside the post office in El Djem. John found it hard to understand her. The line was not very clear and she spoke so softly and with such a strong accent he had to ask her to repeat herself several times.

‘Can you please speak a bit louder!’ He felt as if he were instructing a child.

But she did not speak any louder. She just repeated her message in exactly the same murmur. In the end he asked her to call again later when Sabiha was home.

When Sabiha came home he told her, ‘Your sister called. I couldn’t understand a word she said.’

Sabiha was hanging up her coat and putting her apron on. The back door was open, André's cat watching them, as if it was also hoping for some news. Tolstoy stood off on his own looking down the lane.

She was alert all day for the telephone, but her sister did not call back. She waited up in the evening, standing out in the empty dining room with the lights off, her arms folded under her breasts, looking into the street. There was a steady stream of people coming and going at the Kavi brothers’ store. It was becoming a new world out there. Houria would not have recognised the street these days. The Indian boys were the only ones
who seemed to know what they were doing. André's and Arnoul’s shops were unvisited antiques from the old days. Nothing was French anymore.

She turned around and looked at the telephone where it hung on the wall behind the bar, as if looking would make it ring. It stayed as silent as if its wires had been cut. She almost went over and checked that they had not been cut.

At eleven she gave up and went out to the bathroom and had a wash then went upstairs. If her father had died, John would have understood that much from Zahira, or Zahira would have telephoned again. It wouldn’t be her father’s death, Sabiha was sure of it. His condition had probably deteriorated unexpectedly. It would have taken something like that to have made Zahira walk to the post office on her own and make the call. She would not have done it if she had not needed to. She must have woken this morning to find their father much worse. Or had he asked her to make the call on his behalf? At the thought of her father asking for her, a surge of emotion caught Sabiha in the throat and she gave a helpless little cry. She would not let herself weep, not yet. She prayed to someone’s god that she was pregnant this time. It had been almost two weeks but there was no sign yet. Nothing. There were moments when she truly believed she would kill
herself if her period came again. She could hardly stand the suspense. Her body was silent. Unchanged. Empty. She wanted to scream,
Give me my child!

How much easier it would have been if Bruno had been an ordinary cynical man. What was he thinking? What was he waiting for?
I have seen it.
What did he mean? Her grandmother was no help to her. She had gone too. Into the silence. This emptiness of waiting day after day, night after night, without a sign.

Going up the stairs she felt like an old woman. She paused halfway, one hand on the banister, her eyes closed, gathering her courage to face John. She had the feeling he knew.

He was in bed with the lamp on. He had a new book. Benvenuto was still on the chair beside him, as if he could not bear to part with his old friend just yet. She got undressed. She didn’t look up but knew he was watching her. She was careful not to catch his eye. If she caught his eye she would be required to smile, and then he would expect to have sex when she got into bed. She couldn’t bear the thought of making love. No one but herself could see the ruin she had brought on them. She would never tell him. He must never know what she had done. She put on her nightdress and went around to her side of the bed and climbed in.

‘Goodnight, darling,’ she said. She tried to put some gentleness and warmth into her voice. She closed her eyes.

John reached over and put his hand on the rise of her hip. ‘I love you,’ he said quietly.

‘And I love you too.’ Bruno was right: she was never going to find a way back to herself. Her old self was lost in this labyrinth.

John’s hand remained resting on her hip, his thumb and fingers massaging her lightly.

She kept her eyes closed and willed him not to ask her anything. If he asked her now she knew she would not be able to make up a lie. One minute she was vowing never to tell him, and the next she was ready to tell it all. There was no certainty anymore, no solid ground for her to stand on. She didn’t know what she was thinking. To lie to John now seemed almost a greater evil than betraying him with Bruno. To lie to the one you love! The one who trusts you! How terrible! Her chest felt thick and heavy.

The weight of his hand through the blankets. At last he patted her and took his hand away and she heard him turn a page of his book. He cleared his throat. It was something familiar that he always did whenever there was an awkwardness between them. A little clearing of his throat. A quiet reassurance to himself
that all was well, or that things could be mended at least. That much of him she was certain of. He was not going to press her for explanations. He was going to let her decide when it was time to let him back into the intimacy of her life. How would it be if he did insist? If he took her by the shoulders and turned her towards him and told her he was putting up with no more of her mysterious nonsense. But he would never do that. He would respect her feelings and not question her, until she invited him to. She was safe with John. John would wait. She could rely on him to wait. For how
long
would he wait? For a year? Forever? Yes, she knew it was quite possible that John would wait forever. That he would be prepared to go to his grave in ignorance, rather than hurt her in any way. They still slept in the same bed, but she had abandoned him.

There was a loud crack downstairs and she jumped.

John said, ‘It’s just the stairs, darling. Go to sleep.’

A cat somewhere gave a distressed yowl.

The street outside was deeply quiet.

She listened. There was not a sound. It was as if everyone had crept away, she and John were the only ones left in the neighbourhood, the only ones not to have heard the warning,
To stay is certain death.
If she slept now she would have a nightmare, she could feel it waiting for her. She remembered when she was a child
forcing herself to stay awake in case a strange creature came in the night and took her away. The creature had come. She had been taken away. She was beyond help. She was afraid of the good boy Bruno.

John said gently, ‘Are you crying, darling?’

She sniffed. ‘No.’

A minute later he turned a page.

Sabiha woke into the night stillness. She lay listening to the silence. Had an urgent shout called her out of sleep? Everything was quiet. The thin light around the edges of the curtains from the solitary streetlamp on the corner. John snoring steadily beside her. No disturbance on the street. No dogs howling. Nothing. Just the steady hum of the night. Had her father died and called to her as he left this world? She felt a chill at the thought of it. Calling to his favourite daughter, so far away from him, his daughter lost to him, blaming himself for the loss of her, regretting sending her to help his sister all those years ago. Her father breathing his last sorrowing for her, longing for the clasp of her hand in his, her lips against his forehead. Her sweet breath in his face. Her dear father. Why hadn’t Zahira called?
Sabiha felt a terrible regret that she had not gone home to see her father. Now she would never see him again.

Then the truth suddenly struck her. It wasn’t her father who had called to her at all. It was her grandmother! She slipped her hands under her nightdress and felt her breasts. They were tender, as if lightly bruised, her nipples hard. This was not the fleeting tenderness she often felt a day or two before her period was due—her period was due on Friday—but was something else, something more lasting, something far more substantial. She was certain of it. It was a feeling that was entirely new to her. It was a feeling she had never experienced before. She knew it, she was pregnant!

She gasped, emotion flooding through her, a rush of warmth sweeping through her brain and her body. It was the warmth of another being inside her. She had conceived. The child was with her. She caught her breath and wept. If only she could have woken John and told him her news! She was to have her little girl beside her! She could feel her grandmother smiling on her. She had risked everything and had rescued her child from oblivion. There could be no regrets now, no loss of faith, no uncertainty. No matter what she was called on to confront now, she would be strong for her daughter’s sake. She wept, with relief, with gratitude, with the astonishment of disbelief. At last she was to
be a mother. She thought of that summer night years ago with John, when she believed she had conceived. In her mind now this child was that same child. It had always been the same child.
Her
child.

She laid both hands flat on her stomach and closed her eyes. She would wait until Friday, then for another few days, a week more maybe, before going to the doctor to have it confirmed. But she knew already this was not a false sign.

She whispered, ‘I am a mother.’ What could go wrong now? She would go home and see her father at once. He had not died in the night. She would sit beside her father’s bed and place his hands on her stomach. Those strong hands of his that held her when she was a little girl, her father’s quiet courage making the world safe. They had been each other’s champions. How fiercely she had loved him when she was a little girl. How greatly she had admired him. Had understood him so perfectly it was at times as if she
was
him. Her dear father. She had never believed so confidently in the continuation of the old people as she did at this moment. When she thought of her father dying, she was certain the voices of the ancestors persisted. Out there somewhere. In the mysterious uncanny silence. Why should it not be so? The voice of her grandmother
had woken her from her sleep. She had not imagined that call.

She would go with her child in her womb and see her father and for a brief time the three of them would be together in the old home. She would set her father free to take his leave of this world. Wasn’t it the same heartbeat in her child that beat in her own breast? Sabiha could see her father’s smile as he placed his hands on her belly and closed his eyes, the new life under his hands. Now that her child was coming, she was sure that her father’s death was not to be the end of him.

She slept. And when she woke again she began to ask herself the impossible questions, questions for which she had no answers, but for which she would soon be required to provide answers. John must be the first to know. And was she to tell Bruno he was to be the father of her child? She saw Bruno now as a strangely unstable and even rather infantile man. She had ceased to see him as the man of
the perfect score.
It had been John’s taunt that day that had begun this whole thing;
Did you know Bruno’s got eleven kids?
How could she not have flung it back in his face? Her patience with him reached an end that day and she felt she had to go and find her own answer. There was a great blast of energy in her head and in her chest that day. She
could still feel it. She had known from that moment that she must either take matters into her own hands or remain without her child for the rest of her days. Well, she had done it. Her child was safe in her womb. So why was she afraid?

She turned her head on the pillow and looked at John. Would she tell him everything, from the beginning? How was she going to navigate the contradictions of her life now? The dangers that were ahead of her, she began to see as she lay there in the dark, were far greater than any that were behind her. The child, like the death of the lion, was a beginning, it was not an end. The thing was not done yet.

Looking at John it seemed to her that men are forever alone. Men, she said to herself, are not like women. Their aloneness is in their souls. In their deepest place, men remain solitary all their lives. No matter how well loved they know themselves to be by a woman, men are always on their own. We never touch them in the place of their solitariness. John is alone now, lying here beside me sleeping. And when he reads his books, then he is also alone. He looks in those old dead books for the answer to his own aloneness, seeking a confirmation of his solitariness in the thoughts of other men, hoping to hear in their thoughts an echo of his own deepest aloneness. And when he meets
it, he says to himself with satisfaction,
There! I knew it already.
And when he drinks too much wine he embraces his aloneness as if it were a punishment that he has deserved. And when he goes out on the Seine at night with André in his boat and they fish together and share their friendship, then they are alone in their hearts and they know it and it afflicts them, and they can’t be honest with each other. And their dishonesty twists their thoughts around each other and around their friendship and makes them dissatisfied, and they withdraw into themselves and into their solitariness for the grain of solace that is there for them. Solitariness is a man’s only truth. And that is the difference between us and them.

But the woman who has a child growing inside her body is not alone. The man has no companion for his soul. He is always looking for something he can’t have. He is always discontent. But the woman who is a mother has a companion for her soul. Woman is not singular, she thought. Man is singular and always remains so. It is an illusion for Bruno that he has become a new man, but for me it is a reality that I have become a new woman. The truth will destroy Bruno’s illusion and leave him alone and sorrowing. But the truth of my motherhood will confirm the change in me.

She felt sorry for John and for Bruno and for poor silly old André, and for all men—even her father. It is not just Bruno; they are like children, she thought. Men never meet the perfect friend they dream of meeting. The hero they long for. They dive deep into themselves, hoping to find a companionable meaning, and they find only themselves.

She drifted among these thoughts until she at last fell asleep again. In her dream the sun shone on a field of ripening wheat in the Medjerda Valley and she was a girl. It began as a happy dream. The figure of her grandmother, dressed in black, walking ahead of her through the golden wheat. Sabiha was hurrying to catch up with her grandmother in order to show her a beautiful flower she had found among the stalks of wheat. As the dream went on a little, Sabiha began to realise that no matter how fast she went, and no matter how slowly her grandmother seemed to be going—and her grandmother was going along very slowly—she was never going to catch up with her grandmother. Her frustration at not having sufficient strength of will to overcome the forces holding her back became so strong in the end that Sabiha woke, suddenly, with a feeling of alarm.

She lay there wide awake seeing her dream and feeling as if something terrible was about to happen to her.

She realised John was not beside her.

Then she heard him coming up the stairs and smelled the freshly brewed coffee. Her heart was thumping in her chest. With a shock, she remembered she was pregnant. How
could
she have forgotten? Even for a second? She sat up. Yet she had forgotten. For far more than a second. She wanted to feel her breasts to reassure herself she had not dreamed her pregnancy, but at that moment John came into the bedroom and put on the light. He was carrying the tray with their coffee and biscuits.

He said, ‘Good morning, darling. How did you sleep?’ He set the tray on the chair beside the bed and reached for her dressing-gown and draped it around her shoulders. ‘It’s freezing outside. Wet and freezing.’

She must have been staring at him with a peculiar expression on her face. He laughed and said, ‘What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

She burst into tears, spilling coffee over the blanket.

John jumped up and took the bowl from her, then put his arms around her and held her against him. He rocked her gently backwards and forwards. ‘There, there, darling. It’s all right.’ The lovely smell of her hair. He smiled. She was like a child who had woken
from a bad dream. ‘I love you so much, my darling,’ he whispered into her hair.

She couldn’t stop crying. When she did finally pull herself together she blew her nose and wiped her eyes. He was sitting there smiling at her and looking pleased with himself. She decided to tell him everything.

As she went to speak, the words forming already in her head, she met a powerful resistance. It was the same force that had prevented her from catching up with her grandmother in the dream. It was as if she finally stood at the lip of a precipice and could not make herself jump. A deep unbidden urge of self-preservation, it was, preventing her from telling John the astonishing fact that she was carrying Bruno’s child. It was just too enormous to put into words. She couldn’t do it.

John said, ‘You have to go and see your father at once. You mustn’t leave it any longer. If your father were to die before you had a chance to say goodbye to him properly …’ He shrugged. ‘Well, you know you’d never forgive yourself.’ He put his hand on hers and leaned and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You’re exhausted worrying about it all. I can see that. Get Sonja to come over and do the cooking for a week. She’s got those two big lumps of girls of hers to look after the spice stall. She can’t sing, but she
can
cook. The two of us will
hold this place together till you get back. You mustn’t worry about it anymore.’

He put his arms around her and held her close against him. ‘I’ll do the Friday morning run from now on. I should have offered ages ago. I’m a mean bastard, lying in bed here reading these useless books of mine every Friday as if they’re some kind of necessity, while you go traipsing off in the rain to drag yourself around that rotten market week after week. From now on I’m doing it, and I don’t want to hear any arguments from you.’ He sat back and looked at her. He reached over and wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘Okay then? All better now?’

She thanked him.

He got up off the bed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing. I feel ashamed of myself for not offering before.’ He leaned forward and looked into her eyes and lowered his voice. ‘You’re a strong woman. I know you’ll get through this and come out the other side smiling.’