The Girl With Borrowed Wings (19 page)

“Nenner—” Sangris said. He sounded almost as bad as I felt. He touched my arm and I flinched.

Down in the lower level of the school building a flood of noise came as students entered. I didn’t know why they’d all been outside. I heard excited babbles about a camel that had peed on the head teacher’s car, or something. I didn’t care. Sangris picked me up, the way he did when we flew, and carried me through an undecorated door close by. He shut it behind us. Gloom. Only a sharp white light came from the cracks around the door. We were in a closet. The wave of people washed by on the other side of the door, chattering.

He held me uncertainly for a moment. I didn’t cling to him and I didn’t cringe away either. “Do you want me to put you down?” he said at last. “I can’t tell.”

“Yes,” I said. I found that I was able to speak without too much difficulty. As a matter of fact, my voice revolted me because it sounded so steady.

He put me down. At once I curled up against the wall, putting my arms back over my head to protect myself. I made myself speak again. “Did you,” I said, breathing quickly, shallowly, “did you just . . .”

I couldn’t even say the word.

“Kiss you?”

Sangris sat beside me and put his fingers on my shoulder timidly. I jumped at the touch. “On the
mouth
?” I said. I couldn’t look at him. I said it to my knees.

“That’s . . . where people kiss, Nenner.”

“Not me! Not me, not me!”

All at once the world was a horrible place. I wanted his hand off my shoulder.

“Why are you so upset? I told you how I felt. And it’s not like I haven’t tried to do it before,” he said, and a little more of the light seeped out of the room.

“Before?” I moaned.

He had the grace to sound embarrassed. “In the tree, before I attacked Juren. And in your room, before I kissed your foot. But I thought about it a lot before then . . . I told you . . .”

There was a chilled, sickly feeling collecting in the pit of my stomach, as if the dregs, dead leaves, and muck from the bottom of a pond were slopping together and congealing in my gut. It was all my fault. I’d hoped that the way I peppered every other sentence with an insult would be enough to discourage . . . this. But obviously not. For months I’d looked the other way, while hanging around a boy who . . . I screwed my eyes tightly shut. I’d been that word my friends hadn’t dared to call me. My father put it best. In
Pfft
. I had been walking with Sangris down the streets of
Pfft
.

“I’m sorry I did that. I don’t mean to force you,” he said in a low voice. His hand, a stranger’s now, stroked my shoulder and I flinched away. “It’s all right. You should know by now, I . . .” But evidently I didn’t know anything. I clenched tighter into my ball. “It’s fine. I understand. It’s a big step . . .”

“Big. Enormous. Vast,” I babbled. “It’s practically a canyon. A leap to the moon. So let’s just never try to cross it, okay?”

His hand paused on my shoulder. That had jarred him. “What,” he said, “
never
?”

“Never ever ever ever ever ever,” I said, gripping on to the childishness. “Ever ever!”

To my relief, his hand was drawn back. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Nenner, I don’t think you understand how much that hurt.”

I had only been restating the obvious. I uncurled a little to stare at him. “Why should it hurt? Didn’t you know?”

I could see on his face that it did hurt; that, in fact, he’d been understating it. I knew all of Sangris’s facial expressions as well as I knew my own now. At least that was one thing I could rely on. His mouth was curled, the skin beneath his eyes dark gray. But he met my gaze. “I’d hoped—” he said, struggling. “Nenner, why don’t you want to?”

Didn’t he know that
not
wanting to was the most natural thing in the world? Just the thought of it made me freeze like a hunted animal. This wasn’t anything as simple as obedience to my father, or concern over what my friends would say if they knew, or a desire to preserve my honor, or anything that society imposed on me. Didn’t his wings mean we could escape from all of that? No, the problem was inside of me—the way I’d been wired and the way I’d wired myself—the invisible finger pointing into my back—the gap where I’d cut my heart away—the itch—I had internalized it, and I carried it around with me like a snake coiled inside my chest, squeezing tight. “I don’t need a justification for not wanting to k-kiss you, Sangris,” I said.

“Of course not,” he said. He flushed painfully. “I was just wondering if there was a specific reason.”

“How about that I’m way too young?” I said. “I’m not ready.”

“Darling,” he said, “you’re sixteen.”

“Way too young!”

“For what? A kiss?”

“Stop saying that word!”

“It’s not dirty,” he said, bewildered.

Yes it was.

He looked at me helplessly for a little while. I turned back to my knees. “I could wait,” he said finally.

“No.”

“I’ll wait as long as you like.”

“Forever, then,” I said. I didn’t intend to be nasty. I really meant it.

He drew in a breath as if he’d been punched. Another moment passed. “Nenner,” he said, trying to keep his voice reasonable, “sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with it. Aren’t you ever going to marry someone?”

“Not if I can help it. If my father makes me.”

A scuffle came from his side of the closet. He’d moved too fast and bashed his head against one of the shelves. “So you’ll let your father— Don’t you see I have more of a right to kiss you than some idiot stranger picked out by your father?”

That did it. I sat up. “You do not have the
right,
” I said. “Nobody has the right to . . . Especially not you. I’ve told you, I’m not interested. So stop pushing. And, you know what, it’s none of your business what my father decides to do with me.”

“But Nenner, you need more of a life than—than a set of rules constructed by
him
. Of course it’s my business,” Sangris said. “And . . .” He swallowed, studying me. I kept my eyes on the floor. There was a spider on it. “And I love you,” he said.

A wave of sickness went through my stomach.

“Nenner?” he said, when I did not speak for the next minute. I watched as the spider scuttled into a crack beneath the wall.

“I hate love,” I said at last. “I always have. Love makes people complacent and self-absorbed. They all come to believe that nothing in the world is more important than their chosen one and their love. That’s just a form of arrogance, really. But love wraps it up in a sickly sweet bundle so that everyone is obliged to smile at it and act as if it’s somehow laudable. And it may draw two people together, but in doing so it alienates them from the rest of the world. ‘Look how special we are, look how lucky we are to enjoy a connection that no one else can ever understand!’ It’s a way for ordinary people who are bored with their lives to fool themselves into thinking that there’s something exciting going on. They have to find meaning in other people, because there’s none in themselves. Love is cowardice.”

A pause. “Maybe sometimes,” he said. “I take it you don’t love me, then.” The shadows around his eyes were almost black.

I didn’t have to think about it. “No.”

Sangris bit at his bottom lip so hard his teeth cut it and blood showed. He shut his eyes briefly. Then he opened them again and said, “You’re unfair.”

Indignantly, I said, “Why? Because I don’t—”

“No. Because you
knew
.”

My lip curled. “What did I know?”

I hate it when people decide that they know what’s inside my head.

“You knew I loved you,” he shouted. His hair was full of dust from the wall. “All this time. You must have known. I made it so obvious that I wanted to cringe at myself. I told you in a hundred different ways each night. You may be sheltered, but you’re not stupid and you’re not blind. How the hell can you pretend to not have known?” His face was all crumpled and unfamiliar with bitterness.

“All right, so I knew. But I didn’t encourage you,” I said. I listened in wonder to how icy my voice sounded.

“You were cold at first,” he muttered, “but then you began to loosen up, and I thought . . .”

Another wave of sickness. He was practically accusing me of being—that thing. The s-word that my friends were too delicate to use. “I didn’t encourage you,” I repeated. Each word was brittle in my mouth. I felt them click on my tongue as if they were made of metal matchsticks. “You wanted to hope, so you did.”

A long while passed. He opened and shut his mouth a few times, struggling over his next words. Whatever it was, it had to be something private, something he didn’t want to give up. What could be more private than “I love you”?

“But you—” said Sangris. Then he stopped again. He didn’t want to say it. He wanted to keep something he’d loved.

And my flat, cold voice said, “I what?”

Sangris wouldn’t look at me now.

“You said . . . a tenth,” he mumbled to the dirty floor.

Filth surrounded us. Strings of cobwebs dangled from the ceiling; a stain of water from some cracked pipe spread across the floor. The puddle must be constantly replenished from a leak in the plumbing, I thought. Otherwise it would have dried up. Air-conditioning in the classrooms kept the school cool, but here at the end of the hall, heat had been able to build and the air inside the little closet was stifling.
Our friendship began around the stars,
I thought,
and ends in dust
.

“I’m sorry,” I said, also to the floor. “I can’t.” The words sounded useless.

Sangris unfolded and stood inside the dirty closet. “I want to be alone for a while,” he said. He reached for the door. Then he stopped, and stood there for a full minute, his hand frozen on the wood. Finally, he looked down at me. I looked up from my position on the greasy floor. I took in his face properly for perhaps the last time. The slanted pupils of his eyes, the yellow gold glowing in the gloom. The lines of his face, the angles, the planes of shading, I memorized them so that I could sit down and sketch him detail by detail without having to look at the page as I worked. The wavy black hair streaked with dust, the cheekbones, the mouth that he had put to mine. “Should I come back?” he said. Ever, he meant.

My logic spoke for me. “No,” I said.

His mouth twitched, but that was all. His face closed up and he nodded. He turned his eyes away, opened the door, and closed it gently behind him. I heard the babble in the hall outside die down momentarily, then start up again louder than ever.

I put my head down onto my arms and allowed my heart to race for the first time since I’d entered the closet. The waves beat through me, faster and faster, roaring now. I tapped my fingers against the floor and noticed with surprise how solid it felt. I’d expected everything to be melting away. But the world held firm around me, like a hard shell. For once I was the one who melted. I cried and cried, not just for Sangris, but also because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My mouth burned where it had been touched.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In Which I Explain a Redless World

Here is what I think
you
think at this point. You think that I was an idiot; that deep down I did love Sangris but that I was just too dense, or too repressed, or too frightened, to realize it; and that in the end the dumb girl will admit she loved him all along and everything will follow from there. But the problem was deeper than that.

When I told Sangris I didn’t love him, I meant it.

I wasn’t in denial. I just wasn’t in love with him. I simply wasn’t capable of it. It is true that, if I had been brought up differently, or lived in another country, or in a different family, I
would
have loved him. If I was more like the Nenner who belonged among the sunflowers and less like the Frenenqer Paje my father had sculpted, then I would have been able to say the word
kiss
without shuddering, and I would have adored the Free person with every drop of blood that beat in my body. But as it was, every time a bit of natural feeling began to slide its way through my ribs, it felt like the stab of a knife into my side, and my heart, rather than fluttering sweetly, seized up as if it was allergic. My father’s ever-present fingers at my back reached right through my skin and clamped down around my insides, and then there would be a painful struggle between the frozen fingers and the feeling that wanted to flow, but the fingers had been there longer and love always lost.

Even when I used to read love scenes in my books, I felt uneasy and sick, as though I was witnessing something very wrong. When couples kissed in movies, I averted my eyes and died of embarrassment if my father was there, as he inevitably was, watching the screen with a narrowed, disapproving gaze. “Disgusting,” he would say, looking over at me to make sure that I agreed. And my friends . . . If a boy in my class spoke to me, they would sit and watch for any reaction on my part. Just watch. Sometimes with a low, nervous laugh and a whisper. It occurred so consistently that I’d been trained to squirm even if they didn’t happen to be there. Even witnessing the affection between a child and a mother, a kiss on the cheek, for example, when a woman came to take her kid home after school, humiliated me.

The shape of the person I was supposed to be fit around me like a full-body brace. My father had trained me too well, constructed me too carefully—to the point that I’d taken over his job myself.

I’d chosen my path as an eleven-year-old kneeling in my bathroom, and I’d chosen the same path that day in the Omani wadi, and I never swerved. I was like a red-blind person walking through a world in which love was colored brilliant scarlet.

After Sangris left me that day, I slunk out of the closet and found Anju. She took one look at me and said uneasily, “What is it?”

Another girl might have hugged me or patted me on the back, or something. But Anju and I weren’t like that. We found an empty corner and sat there in silence. She didn’t ask any more questions. She brought me food from the Pakistani room next door. Together, we waited for Heritage to be over.

A year has passed since then. I’m older and not much wiser. Nowadays, when I sit on the windowsill in the middle of the night and try to breathe as the heat presses in on me, I do it alone. For the most part I’m calm. I walk, shrouded, down the path my father picked for me. I pretend. My obedience is so exemplary that I’m allowed to read now. I rely on a backbone of books and, most of the time, they’re enough to keep me quiet, half drugged with dreams of imaginary worlds. But sometimes it gets too much, and then I have a burst of frenzy. A short while after Sangris left, I had the wild idea that he might be waiting for me at that spot in the sunflowers of Spain. I decided to walk the Camino de Santiago, and when of course my father said no, I determined to earn the money myself. But as always, my father won without having to try. It’s illegal for a girl to work in the oasis, and I didn’t have a father’s or a husband’s permission . . . I sank back into my waking coma like rainfall disappearing into the dust.

Somehow, my parents have managed to not notice. One day my mother attacked my head with a pair of scissors, and even though I had spent years fending her off, now I just blinked as the long locks went floating to the ground. And she didn’t notice anything wrong about my reaction. All my parents see is that I read even more than I did before.

A few months ago, my mother came into my room and dug me out of a mountain of books. “You’re going to Oman this weekend,” she said.

I dropped the book and looked up at her.

“I know what you’re thinking—”

“Frogs,” I interrupted.

“Oh. All right, so I didn’t know what you were thinking,” she said impatiently. “But anyway, your father is going to stay with some friends of his. A local family, very respectable.”

Ah, yes. My father was proud of his “connections.” Local families tended to be rich and powerful. He was always eager to please anybody dressed in a white dishdasha.

“I suggested that you should go with him,” said my mother.

I just blinked at her. I hadn’t been out of my three boxes for months. I would probably crumble to dust in full daylight.

“The family has a daughter your age. Rhagda. She would be happy to show you around. Your father will be there along with her parents, and she has a personal driver, so it’s safe. Come on. You need to get away from these books.” She kicked them, unfairly. Their pages splayed out as if they were wounded. “Pack your things.”

It wasn’t an invitation at all, it was a command. I packed my things. Half the things were books.

I had to skip a day of school for the long trip. My father drove me across the border into the heart of Oman. This time, it was the Oman of my father’s world, not the wild and hidden Oman that Sangris and I had shared. All day I sat in the backseat, my face separated from the searing outside air by an inch of glass. Without a word, I watched long plains, covered in nothing but dry stones and white dust, shake past.

When we arrived in the Garden City of Oman, in a place of striped pavements and long sun-bleached roads and white buildings, we met my father’s friends under the arched roof of the souk. It was a honeycomb of smooth, dim tunnels filled and filled with stalls beside the startling peacock-blue glory of the sea. I was introduced to a small figure in a black
abiya,
standing beside her father. Rhagda. Her face was uncovered. It was long and thin, with a hooked nose. I looked with envy at the beautiful darkness of her
abiya
. It made her so aloof, so remote. It gave her the chance to hide her body from strange eyes and to float along in her own bubble of black cloth. I would have worn one if I could get away with it.

Rhagda’s life must have been just as boring as mine—she was excited to see me. When we got to her house, she showed me around, through massive rooms with expensive, untouched furniture and of course rows and rows of golden chandeliers hanging from the ceilings—a ceiling was naked if it didn’t have a chandelier. Sometimes there were more than three in the same room. On the balcony she showed me a tub of water with a turtle inside. She shrugged and said that there used to be two, but then the maid had come in one day and discovered that one turtle had bitten off the other one’s head and was eating its neck. I looked at the mad turtle with a shudder.

In her bedroom there were two beds. The room used to belong to her brothers, she said, but now it was hers. She had seven older brothers and no sisters.

“My brothers are nice. You might meet them,” she said. She threw herself onto her bed and watched as I got onto mine. Then she added, “But if you meet the one with the beard, don’t shake his hand.”

I looked at her.

“He can’t touch women,” she explained. I nodded. Even though this wasn’t my native culture, I had absorbed bits of it, and their sunlight had seeped into my skin for so many years that it had become the sea I swam in. It was second nature to hear the muezzin call. The song rippled out over the city, from mosque to mosque, like blood through a heart, and to me that was the sound of the pulse of time. Rhagda pulled out her patterned red prayer rug and I looked away politely until she was done. Afterward, she showed me her “supermodel walk.” She put a hand on one thin hip and strutted across the room, black veils streaming behind her. She wasn’t bad.

To sleep I wore one of my oversized nightshirts, but I put on shorts underneath too, because anything less would have been inappropriate. The shorts were pink, patterned gaily with pictures of kittens and flowers. I’d had them ever since I was small. They stopped just above my knees. I was a bit worried about my bare shins, but the bright innocence of the baggy shorts reassured me, and anyway there was only the two of us in the room.

At three in the morning I woke up because I thought I’d heard a noise. I looked across at Rhagda’s bed, but the dim outline of her sleeping form didn’t move. I searched around the unfamiliar room and found the windows. Hidden by thick curtains, of course. I peeked through a window quickly. Nothing but moonlight. I let the curtains fall back into place.

It was wrong to be disappointed, but despite everything, the lack of my best friend was still a hole in the world beside me. I needed to get out of the room. I opened the door gently and slipped through into the darkness of the corridor outside. Persian carpets were beneath my feet, the banisters on the stairway gleamed, and mirrors reflected my dark shape back at me, making me jump. I wondered what Sangris was doing. I hardly believed that he still existed.

Like a ghost, I drifted through the shadowy, aloof opulence of Rhagda’s house, the glimmers of the chandeliers floating past above me. I found myself in the living room, opposite the long, wide windows that let the moonlight in. I looked out at the tangled palm trees and the bare garden, and, unthinking, sank down onto the sofa. In the moonlight I could see that the sofa was purple and that the curtains, drawn apart, were probably dark blue. A deep, terrible loneliness beat through me. I always missed Sangris most in the middle of the night.

I couldn’t have been there for more than five minutes when I heard a sound. It caught me by surprise and I whirled around. There was a figure emerging from the kitchen. For a fraction of a second I thought of Sangris—but then I saw the glass of water in its hand. One of the inhabitants of the house, maybe one of the mysterious brothers, had come down for a drink of water. I realized that I was sitting cross-legged on their couch and that my lower arms and my lower legs were visible. I uncrossed my legs at once. But there was no way to hide my skin.

The figure came farther out from the gloom of the kitchen, and the moonlight shone on a beard. He put the glass of water down on one of the tables.

I couldn’t move. A wave of sick embarrassment went through my stomach and I wanted nothing more than to squirm out of the revealing light of the heatless, heartless moon. I was like the bugs that you find hiding beneath stones, when the stone is lifted away and suddenly they are exposed to the world. A man. He was a
man
and his beard was dark and curly. There was a stunned look behind it. He had probably never seen a girl, or a woman, uncovered in his house before. It must have been the last thing he’d expected, to walk out into his living room and find a strange girl sitting in the moonlight, showing him her knees.

“Sorry,” I said, my voice very small. “I didn’t think anyone would be awake. I’m Rhagda’s friend . . .” I didn’t know if he understood English. My voice trailed away. I couldn’t breathe. My knees, my knees. I tried to tug the childish, ridiculous shorts farther down. My heart had frozen. I may as well have been dancing around in a bikini. But there was no way to cover myself.

The figure of Rhagda’s brother came closer. He looked down at my wide eyes, at the smooth skin on my shins. I watched as his hand came out. He hesitated with his fingers an inch away from my foot, at the place where Sangris had kissed it once. Everything was still for a moment, as though reality hung balanced on a thin line and was not yet sure which way to fall. Then Rhagda’s brother turned and ran away. And I was left stranded, blatant, in the strip of moonlight, no better than a harlot.

I scrambled out of the light, holding my stomach and shaky with shame. I stared wildly into all the corners to make sure there had been no witnesses, that my father was not lurking in the shadows, his mouth tight with horror. No one was around. And that, somehow, was even worse. I grew afraid that Rhagda’s brother would come back and I fled to her room.

Rhagda’s sleeping form gave me no comfort. I wondered what she would say if she knew. I
knew
what my father would say if he knew. I buried myself beneath the blankets and stared at the cloth, concentrating on breathing. I was trembling so much, I shook the bed. It shook until morning. If anybody knew . . . But Rhagda’s brother wouldn’t tell them. He had behaved honorably. He had run away from me. The blame was all mine. I should never have left the room without covering up first. Maybe my time with Sangris had made me careless. I remembered catching frogs with him, the two of us alone in the mountains. My body was a menace. No, I was a menace.

I didn’t speak much for the rest of the weekend. I hid in Rhagda’s room, afraid to see him again. I festered in my embarrassment. When the weekend was over and my father drove me back to the oasis, I said nothing for the entire drive, still reeling from my own mistake.

This was my world. This was the background I came from, the sea I swam in. The world my father chose for me. A world where shins, exposed in the faint moonlight, were enough to make a bearded figure halt and tremble, enough to horrify us both, and enough to make me want to cut them off and throw them away. Now do you see why it was incredible that I let Sangris as close as I did? Why it was a miracle that I ever felt comfortable enough to wear a skirt in front of him? And how a kiss could make me feel so violated? Think of the moonlight and the curtains, and the disgrace of my uncovered ankles, and understand.