Lovesong (18 page)

T
he following afternoon, after the customers had returned to their places of work and the cleaning up was finished, Sabiha went into the sitting room under the stairs and lay down on the couch and covered herself with a blanket. John was on his own at the table by the window in the dining room. He was reading. He turned a page, lifting his cigarette to his lips and narrowing his eyes against the smoke, the murmur of activity from the street, the grey rain falling steadily in the November light. When André walked past the window, his pipe in his mouth, his umbrella held aloft, Tolstoy on the lead, he looked in the window and saluted John with a dip of his head.

The telephone rang and Sabiha woke with a start and threw the blanket aside and got off the couch. She steadied herself with a hand to the arm of the couch,
dizziness washing through her, then stumbled out into the dining room. John had already taken the call. He held out the receiver to her.

‘It’s Zahira,’ he said and went back to the table by the window and picked up his book, which he had set face down on the table when the telephone rang. He held the book open in front of him but did not resume reading. He watched Sabiha. She was speaking Arabic and he could not understand what she was saying. A change always came over her whenever she switched from French to her mother tongue. It was not only the larger range of tones, but a change in the way she carried herself. The sound of the Tunisian dialect was familiar to him. He thought of it as a kind of music. He loved the sound, its strange familiarity. He had once made a half-hearted attempt to learn it. But Sabiha had proved to be an impatient teacher and he was not a good student. That had been during the first year of their life together, when Houria was still alive. The Arabic lessons had usually ended in hilarity. He smiled now, thinking of those days.

Sabiha was half turned away from him, leaning down a little and speaking into the telephone, as if she was straining to
see
something. While she listened, her head moved slightly, registering the message. Then she spoke again, her voice calm and unhurried.

He had forgotten how to say
I love you
in Arabic. It was the first phrase she had taught him. He was lying on top of her on the bed in their old room under the slope of the roof, looking into her eyes and repeating the words over and over, she softly correcting his pronunciation. ‘You’ll never get it,’ she told him, her voice breathless with his weight on her chest. ‘You make the sounds but you don’t make the meaning. You speak Arabic as if it is Australian.’ They laughed and made love. She already knew how to say
I love you
in English. She said it beautifully. Her whispered accents when she spoke English always delighted him.

She hung up the telephone and filled a glass with water at the sink behind the bar then came over and sat opposite him at the table. She drank from the glass and looked at him over its rim, her throat moving

with each swallow. When she had drunk all the water in the glass she set it on the table in front of her and said, ‘Zahira said my father is waiting for me to come home.’ She met his eyes. ‘So he can die. He’s impatient. He’s ready.’

John placed his hand over hers. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’

‘Do you know what he said to Zahira? He said,
Everything will be all
right when Sabiha gets here.’
Her throat tightened on the words as she thought of her father saying this to her sister:
Everything will be all right when Sabiha gets here
! She had been away so long. There was something broken in her connection to home that would never be repaired now. It was not only the death of her father. It was the conviction that the last link with her childhood was about to disappear. Had perhaps disappeared already, even years ago, and she had only just noticed. She thought of the news she was to give her father. The beginning of the new life in her womb, news she did not have the courage to tell her husband. How she had longed for years to have this news for her father, and now it was to be filled with sadness. Her dream had become the dream of something long ago.

John got up and walked around the table and stood behind her. He rested a hand on her shoulder and with the other he gently massaged the tight muscle below her neck. She felt his touch deep in her chest and she closed her eyes and did not resist.

In the morning John brought Sabiha a bowl of coffee and a sweet biscuit. He sat on the side of the bed and sipped the hot milky coffee. The bedroom was cold and it was too early for conversation. They might have been brother and sister, hugging their steaming bowls and gazing vacantly before them. She knew it would happen soon now. She could feel it building behind the stillness. She was waiting for it. The end of this.

John got up off the bed and collected their empty bowls and brushed the biscuit crumbs from the front of his shirt. ‘You’ll only be gone for a week,’ he said. ‘You’ll be back before we know it.’ He had booked her a return flight to Tunis for Monday. Not sure how long she would need to stay, he had left the return date open.

After he had gone to the market she got out of bed and dressed and went downstairs into the kitchen and began the routine of her day, preparing the sweet pastries for the weekend. André's cat pressed its cold fur against her leg. She moved her leg aside and it gave a little cry. She straightened and poured the
smen
into the pan and turned the gas on low.

Her period was due today. There was no sign of it. Her breasts were still sensitive and firm, aroused by the secret tensions in her body. She had goose bumps on her arms. She turned and dropped a piece of broken biscuit on the floor for the cat and whispered, ‘Minette! I am pregnant!’ There, her secret was out! She had told it.

The cat sniffed the biscuit, nudged it disdainfully with its nose, then looked up at her and miaowed unhappily. She felt the cat’s dislike of her. A scavenging god! She tipped the almonds and
smen
into the food processor. Her grandmother would have made it all clear to her. When your little child is in your arms, everything will be forgiven you.

Thinking of her grandmother made Sabiha feel calmer.

How could anyone ever see a little child as a mistake? A mother and child! Or as evidence of an evil act? It was true. Her grandmother would not have panicked, but would have waited patiently, until the answer
came to her, as she knew it would. It is written, my dearest child. Just as the Berber women never roused their camels to hurry when they crossed the highway to Tunis, but crossed as if the highway was not there, following an older road, a road visible only to those who shared their memories. A sacred road that would always be there, no matter what new things people put in its way. She took two large handfuls of dates and put them in the processor with the almonds, then added dried figs. She poured in the orange flower water and switched on the processor and stood watching as the mixture formed a thick paste.

That evening she and John were watching television. She was sitting on the green couch and he was sitting in the big brown armchair. It was a cold night and they had lit the gas fire. It was a film about the war. She was not really following it. The smell of fresh pastries still lingered in the air. When she went across to the grocery store before the midday meal to get some milk, a woman in the queue had stared at her. When she met the woman’s eyes the woman had smiled and looked down at her. How could the woman have known? Sabiha had felt naked to the strange woman’s gaze and
had been forced to look down out of modesty. Would other mothers know as soon as they saw her that she was one of them? Were there signs she did not know?

John made a sound and she looked across at him. The air was stuffy with the gas fire. He was sunk in the deep old chair. His eyes were closed and his chin had dropped to his chest. She saw how he was going to look when he was an old man. Perhaps he was already an old man. She ached with a sudden tenderness for him; to be close to him again as they had once been, as if they were part of each other, one and the same person. She got up and switched off the television and sat down again.

John opened his eyes and heaved himself upright against the back of the chair.

‘I was dreaming,’ he said. ‘Did I say something?’

‘You made a little sound.’

‘We were out in the bush together. It was rolling country. Open country.’ He frowned at the gas fire, recovering his dream. ‘The sun was shining and there were little white puffs of cloud.’ He looked at her. ‘You were with me in Australia. Nowhere particular. Just home with me. It was a race. We had to jump over these red and white striped hurdles, like the horse jumps at the Braidwood show when I was a kid. It was easy. We looked at each other and smiled with
confidence as we floated over the jumps.’ He put his hands on the arms of the chair and, with an effort, stood up. ‘God, that chair swallows you.’

She wanted to tell him,
I’m pregnant, darling.
She wanted to say,
The world has changed. A ball of fire has struck our house and devoured us. My dearest John, my good man, my quiet Australian, we have stood together for more than sixteen years you and I, and tonight we stand among the ruins of our lives.
She wanted to say,
I have betrayed you, and I love you.
It was hurtling towards her now out of the silence. Nothing would prevent it. No power on earth could prevent it …

He came over and held out his hand. She took it and he helped her up.

They stood looking into each other’s eyes. Very gently then, as if he had never dared touch her before this moment, he put his arms around her and drew her close and kissed her on the lips. He drew away at last and looked into her eyes. He did not speak. Did he know?

A scene presented itself to her mind. They were out there in the ungovernable future. She was at his bedside. He was old; the little girl in her womb today was already the young woman of the future standing by the door looking in at the scene. And he, John Patterner, the young woman’s beloved father, was dying.
In this imaginary scene Sabiha held his hand and he looked up at her from the pillow of his deathbed.

And in this imaginary future she told him quietly, ‘Your daughter, my darling man, is not your daughter.’

He smiled, and squeezed her hand. ‘I’ve always known it.’

How simple it was, through the lens of a radiant future time, to speak the truth and be forgiven.

Here, now, in the terrible present moment, she said, ‘I love you, John Patterner.’

He wiped her tears away with his fingers, and smiled and looked into her eyes. ‘And I love you.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

He put his arm around her shoulders and led her from the room. ‘You’re tired. It’s past your bedtime. You and I have nothing to be sorry for, my darling. It has all been worth it.’

J
ohn came into the kitchen from the back lane. He kissed her on the cheek and she flinched from the touch of his cold lips. ‘Everything’s there.’ He set the shopping bag on the bench beside her. ‘Sonja will be over on Monday morning and I’ll take you to the airport.’ He took off his overcoat and scarf and stepped across and hung them on the hook under the stairs.

At the market Sonja had looked him in the eye and said, ‘You’re not cheating on Sabiha, are you?’ She was a short sturdy woman in her middle fifties. She looked as if she had always been this big solid woman of fifty-something, the mother of two grown-up daughters, both unmarried. Her skin was as youthful as her daughters’ skin, her cheeks and hands like those of a teenager, creamy and smooth.

He had laughed.

‘It’s not a joke,’ she said. ‘Sabiha’s not herself. You should take better care of her. You’re not getting another one like that woman. So don’t go fancying you are.’ She was measuring out her blend of
ras el hanout.
Sabiha claimed it was the best in Paris. ‘You stay home and do the right thing,’ Sonja told him severely. She handed across the packets of spice, naming the contents of each packet as she handed it over, her eye going down Sabiha’s list. And last a big glass jar of the aromatic honey that could not be bought in the French shops.

‘You’re not a Tunisian,’ she said. He asked her what he was supposed to think of that, but she just repeated it. ‘You’re not a Tunisian.’ As if her meaning was self-evident. ‘I’ll see you Monday morning.’ She was a woman who could not absolve herself from motherly responsibility for almost everyone she knew. ‘Look after her!’

Sabiha said, ‘Did you happen to see Bruno?’ The sound of his name on her lips startled her.

John came over to the bench and stood beside her. ‘He wasn’t there. His stall was covered with a tarpaulin.’

‘What about his van?’

‘Not there.’ John shrugged. ‘Maybe I should call Angela? What do you reckon? Is it really any of our business?’

She felt a sick stab of fear. She would have to make her confession to John. She could not keep it from him any longer. He must not hear it from someone else. That would be too horrible.

Somehow the hours of the day passed and Sabiha did not make her confession. They were busy and her panic subsided. They both slid into the familiar routine, and before they knew it it was evening again and they were tired and ready for bed. By midday on Monday Sabiha would be in El Djem with her dying father and her sister.

On Friday afternoon she went to the hospital. She waited two hours to see a woman doctor. The doctor confirmed for her that she was pregnant. On the way home on the
métro
she felt a sense of anticlimax. She told herself she was taking her baby home to El Djem but the claim didn’t ring true. There was a deadness about it. She and Zahira would say goodbye to their father. It was the end. She should have felt elated and happy, but instead she felt flat and sad and strangely empty, as if even her child could not possibly be all she had dreamed it would be. Was it possible, it occurred to her, that motherhood would be a disappointment?

Back at Chez Dom she rolled out the pastry for a fresh batch of honey-dipped briouats for Saturday evening. It was the quiet triumph of a commonplace life that her tears mixed with her pastry. Before the
samoom
there is stillness. This stillness is so perfect it sucks the moisture from the air and from the lungs and from the mind. Her grandmother called this stillness the laughter of the gods. Sabiha had always wondered why. Now she understood. This was a day on which Sabiha knew with her grandmother the laughter of the gods. Whichever direction you decided to go, it could not be the right direction. For there was no right direction.