Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (8 page)

I must have looked monstrously horrified, because Signora Khan stopped cold. My face turned white, and beads of sweat began to drip from my forehead, and I remembered why Volatile must be concealed; because there was a man with a shotgun who was looking for her, and there were people out there who would not understand and would scream, “Lock her up! Take her away!” And I had betrayed her, again. Just like my parents.

“Please, Signora Khan, please.”

“What is it, Gabriel?”

I was paralyzed with the realization of what I had done. “Don’t…just don’t…”

And S. Khan leaned over the table and I smelled ginger and fat yellow lemons. She looked me in the eye and saw deep inside me, to all my secrets sliding over each other in the pit of my stomach, like bloated worms. “I won’t tell a soul,” she breathed, “so you just rest easy.”

She smiled at me, and the thought inanely crossed my mind what it would be like to slide a pencil between her two front teeth. She reached out a hand and smoothed back my hair. “At least you comb your hair,” she said, but her voice was different now: jovial, too loud. “I hope you can teach my son.”

Orlando approached the table and kissed his mother on both cheeks. He nodded at me, and for the first time, appeared awkward as he shuffled his feet. I noticed the long, curved slippers he wore, and how he was slightly duck-footed. He was wearing a silk robe embellished with peacocks and roses. He blushed and said, “It’s Imelda’s,” and slid it off his shoulders, where it shimmered in a gleaming puddle on the floor. “Let’s go, Laurentis,” he said, grabbing my glass of coffee and swallowing it down like a shot of vodka.

“
Ciao
!” I called behind my shoulder to S. Khan, and before I knew it, I was being led up a flight of shining spiral stairs, and all around me hung the Khan’s laundry, shiny and satin and bold, that it seemed I was walking upward in a tunnel of leftover circus tents. There could have been rooms to the right and to the left, had to be rooms, where the legendary Imelda beheld her beautiful face in a mirror, where a cupboard held all her silk gowns and pajamas, a closet of thread roses and peacocks. Word had it that she could have been a model in Rome, but her father wouldn’t allow it. And there must have been Signora Khan’s room and the chamber of Signore Kahn himself, and the other sister too, whatever her name was.

But Orlando led me to the very top of the staircase, and I judged we had gone up four levels. When we stepped out, it was into a decaying old loft, with original ancient wood flooring and a solitary window. I rushed to the window and looked out: there was Orvieto town down below, people lining Via Roma to buy tomatoes and lantern oil. There was the Duomo in the distance, and I could see its medieval piazza, where one day I would drink wine on the stone steps, underneath the canopy of the
bibliothequa
, where the four flags flew. Yes, that’s what Orlando and I would do when we were big, every night. And we would call out to girls and they would come and share our wine, and someone would produce a guitar and everyone would sing, and occasionally Mariko’s eyes would meet mine. I would wear my hair long at the front, and style a lock to fall directly over my left eye. I’d find money somewhere for new clothes and I’d smoke American cigarettes.

I turned from the window and looked around. Orlando’s bed was nothing but a thin mattress on the floor, covered with an array of quilts and sheets and scarves with golden tassels. His clothes were thrown into an open wooden chest, like one that used to contain pirate’s booty. A melee of rugs covered the entire floor, and I realized they were imperfect shop goods: soiled, burned by a stray candle, or sold to a customer who deliberately damaged it and returned it the next day, because her husband thought it godless. I noticed that the walls had been painted a chartreuse green, and Orlando himself had drawn haphazard snatches of himself on the walls: a street scene, a sphinx, a depiction of what could have been the Eiffel Tower, an elephant with a decorative trunk.

“Sit,” Orlando commanded, and kicked a large pillow shaped like a sausage toward me. As I sunk into the floor, I felt like I was sinking into clouds. He rummaged through the pirate chest and found a pair of black satin pants that he slid over his narrow hips, covering his pajama shorts. Then he lay down, stretching his long brown body over the rugs and yawned. He lay with his eyes closed for a minute or two, and I began to contemplate leaving, when his eyes snapped open. He leapt to his feet and from the pile of fabric that was his bed, he pulled out a red something. It looked like an ornate vase or candelabra with a hose attached. Silently, Orlando felt around in his black satin pockets until he located a little pink disc, wrapped in cellophane. I watched in awe as he lit existing coals on the instrument with a match, and the water inside it bubbled. Finally, he placed the little disk on the clay bowl on the very top, and the most delicious scent filled the air.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s breakfast,” replied Orlando, and placed the hose in his mouth. He sucked on it deeply and exhaled a smoke cloud that was pink and purple, awash with lights.

“Aren’t we supposed to go to school?”

“You are my guest Gabriel, and it is customary for us to receive our guests until they wish to leave.”

“So you can’t go until I go?”

“It would be considered bad manners.”

“And if I don’t go?”

“Then I would be obliged to entertain you under my roof until you do. And you want to stay all day, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s settled. No school today.” He took his third mouthful of the concoction and passed the hose to me.

I took it and inhaled, expecting it to be horrible like the coffee. Instead, my mouth was full of strawberries and my head became blissfully light and cloudy. “Wow,” I managed, passing back the hose and sinking deeper into my sausage-shaped pillow.

“It’s called a
huqqua
,” informed Orlando, “a water pipe. It was invented many years ago by our ancestors in Rajasthan and was smoked throughout the Persian Empire. Do you like it?”

“I love it,” I said truthfully, for I had never felt happier in my life. I had almost forgotten about my parents, about Volatile. “Does your mamma know you have this?”

“Of course! My father gave it to me for my birthday two years ago.”

“You’ve been allowed to smoke since you were my age?”

“Well, it’s not really smoking. Father says there’s only a tiny bit of tobacco in mine, he fills it up himself. It’s mostly fruit oils and spice.”

“It’s really very good,” I said.

“Why are you here?” Orlando replied.

“I don’t know,” I said, and took a big puff of the pipe.

“You’ve never come here before.”

“I’ve never been allowed to.”

“Most kids aren’t,” Orlando conceded. And his long dark curls fell over his forehead and he smiled his perfect smile.

“I think you look just like Zeus!” I exclaimed, for the coffee and the tobacco had truly gone to my head now.

“How do you know what Zeus looks like?” Orlando laughed.

“Picture books that Signorina Greco has,” I mumbled.

“Isn’t he that old man with a big beard?”

“No, that’s God.”

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

“No!” I giggled.

“Well, let’s see,” Orlando stroked his chin and squinted his eyes at me, “who do you look like?”

I threw my head back and posed like a fashion model on all the Lambretta billboards I’d seen on my one trip to Rome. Orlando and I descended into a fit of giggles, and I felt tears rolling down my face. After we had finished laughing, and Orlando was wiping his cheeks with long brown fingers, he said, “I know. Those painted cherubs inside the Duomo.”

“Those fat babies?”

“Yeah.”

I threw a pillow at him in my defense. “Just in the face!” Orlando cried.

After we had smoked all that the little pink disc provided, which was now a pile of grey ash in the bowl, we lay on our backs and listened to the rain. I thought about my father, who would have picked grapes with our neighbor all morning, and they would have had to quickly haul their sacks into the shed when the rain began. And then I remembered that there was no way he could have done that.

“I broke my Papa’s glasses this morning,” I said.

“Why did you do that?” drawled Orlando lazily.

“I stepped on them. It was an accident.”

“Just take one of my father’s pairs before you go,” he offered.

“I couldn’t do that!”

“Of course you could. He has about fifty and he’d never miss them.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“You can have them if you tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Why’d you really break them?”

I was silent. I thought about my mother with the remains of my milk glass in her hands and I was ashamed. I couldn’t go home and look them in the eye. Not after that. I could never go home again. I wondered if Orlando would permit me to live in the loft until I was old enough to work.

“Was it because of your sister?” he pressed.

“You heard that?” I moaned.

“I kind of did. I can unhear it though, if you want.”

“I do want.”

“You never told me you had a sister.”

“She’s a secret. I don’t tell anyone.”

“Is she like your mother?”

“Kind of.”

“I see,” Orlando nodded seriously. “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone about her.” A slight pause. “Is she pretty?”

“No!”

“Can I meet her if she ever comes back?”

“No!”

“Okay,” Orlando shrugged.

“Okay,” I said, and we were silent for a long time, and then I realized we were both asleep.

I stayed until sundown. Signora Khan came upstairs at one point and lay down a tray of tea, and hot flat bread with no yeast. Orlando taught me how to dip it in an array of pastes contained in long, flat rectangle dishes, some made of peppers and sweet chili, some of ground chickpeas and sesame. It was delicious. We talked, and slept, and smoked more
huqqua
, and as the sun came creeping down, I knew it was time to leave and I dreaded it.

S. Khan made a big show of calling me a taxicab, but I refused, saying I had no money. She offered to pay for it, but she and I both knew it was impossible for me to accept such kindness, no matter how she insisted. So I left quietly, and a little sadly too, and stood on the doorstep of the Khan Emporium waving much longer than I should, looking very foolish. I turned to go, and was grateful for the bulge in my pocket – a brand new pair of glasses from the store that Signora Khan insisted on presenting to me, if I wasn’t to take the offer of a cab. “For your mother, with the compliments of Ayisha Khan,” she said formally. But I knew there would be no such compliments, and that Mamma should never know where I spent that day.

When I arrived home, it was as if nothing had happened. Volatile was gone, and Mamma and Papa were quiet and contemplative. They showed no surprise at me showing up late, and if they detected the hints of tobacco and strawberry concealed in my clothing, they made no comment. I could not manage to say a word, I was far too ashamed. I ate all of my dinner gratefully, and hoped my downcast eyes and hanging head would convey all the apology that words could ever say. When I had finished, I pulled the little eyeglass case out of my pocket and placed it quietly beside my father’s plate. He opened it, and with great surprise, beheld his brand new, shining pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. He put them on, and Mamma laughed, for they were a strange shape on his head, and made his face look funny. I laughed too and Papa blinked many times. “Perfect,” he said, and did not ask where they had come from. I ducked my head and went to my room, where I lay in bed in the darkness and tried to cry because I was so happy to be forgiven.

The next day, everything returned to normal. Papa continued to wear the spectacles, and indeed wore them for many years of his life, until the frames were tarnished and the glass too scratched to see clearly.

“Mother says thank you,” Orlando said at school days later.

“Thanks for what?”

“She received five bottles of
Dolce Fantasia
yesterday. She said she couldn’t drink them herself, but will keep them until we have guests that will.”