Sabiha sat on the narrow bench beside her father and leaned her head against his shoulder. ‘Do you miss your sister?’ she asked him. She was dreaming of her aunt Houria in Paris. She longed to meet her aunt and to know Paris.
S
ince Dom’s death Houria had been worrying about her hair. Dom had liked her to keep her hair long, so that she could uncoil it in front of the dressing-table mirror at night and brush it out while he lay in bed admiring her. ‘Long hair,’ he told her, reaching his arm around her as she climbed naked into the bed beside him, ‘is the true grace of a woman.’ They slept naked. Winter and summer. As long as Dom was alive there had never been a chance of even talking about getting her hair cut short. But Houria had been secretly envying women with short hair for some time.
While no one, and certainly not Houria herself, would have come straight out and said that Dom’s death was a blessing in disguise for Houria, his absence did nevertheless bring certain liberties into her days. There were even odd moments when she caught herself
guiltily enjoying being without him, the thought teasing her that she was entering a new and interesting phase of her life. She had begun letting the grey grow out, but that was all, so far. It was a start. She was not standing still. She saw women of her own age, and even older, going about the streets with fashionably short grey hair and she envied them. It wasn’t so much that they looked smarter, though they did, as that they seemed to her to be freer and more confident. As if they were living in a world of their own choosing. Their
own
world, that’s what she envied these women. Something to do with a decision they had made. Their step was lighter, she noticed, than the step of older women like herself who still wore their hair long and had the grey disguised by the hairdresser every few weeks. Now that Dom was gone, she was impatient to join the short-haired women of Paris before it was too late to enjoy it. She was agonising now over whether Dom had been dead long enough yet for her to get her hair cut short without offering a slight to the dignity of his memory. If she were to suddenly appear on the street and in the café with short hair, mightn’t it seem to everyone that she was
glad
to be rid of him? Mightn’t it even seem like that to herself? This possibility was all that was holding her back.
She was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, holding the bead curtain aside and watching Sabiha lay the tables. Sabiha was wearing a pretty blue and white dress with a belted waist. Her long dark hair was tied back with a blue ribbon. When Sabiha straightened and turned around, Houria said, ‘How do you think I’d look with short hair, darling?’
Sabiha considered her aunt, holding the bunch of knives and forks and the cloth in her hands, seeing a woman nearing fifty, her thick coil of hair growing out at the roots into a strong iron grey. ‘Really short? Or just shorter?’ she asked. Houria had a broad, handsome face, her hair pinned in a double coil and sitting like a cowpat on top of her head. It looked very unnatural and heavy. And it made her aunt look like an old woman. Like a woman who had given up trying, or who was maybe trying too hard. When Houria had complained to her of getting old, Sabiha told her, ‘You don’t seem old to me. You seem really young for someone your age.’ Houria had laughed and hugged her.
‘No,
really
short,’ Houria said, reaching her hands up and pushing at the heavy cowpat with her fingers, dusting her hair with flour—for she was in the middle of making a batch of filo. ‘Down to an inch or two.’ She held up her hand, thumb and forefinger indicating
the length of hair she was aiming for. ‘Two, maybe three at the most. What do you think? Tell me the truth.’ She was longing to get out from under her hair. If Sabiha approved, she would step into the hairdressers this afternoon and have it done. Sabiha herself had beautiful hair, long and glossy and black as … well,
very
black. It would be a terrible pity if Sabiha were to cut her hair short. But that was not the point. Sabiha was twenty-one and would soon have to find herself a husband and start a family. At Sabiha’s age, long hair was as much a necessity of life for a woman as a moustache was for any half-decent sort of man. There was a time for everything.
Sabiha smiled. Her aunt stood before her in her enormous blue apron and those heavy black shoes she always wore. Houria was not a beautiful woman. In fact she was short and fat. She was a lovely woman. But she was not beautiful. Those vast breasts and her strong arms and sturdy legs could not be called beautiful. A good and capable woman she was, to be sure, and kind and generous. All those things. She was surprised now by her aunt’s vanity. Sabiha’s own mother was not vain. Or at least Sabiha had never noticed her mother being vain, not about her appearance at any rate. Her mother was delicate, thoughtful and intensely proud of her husband, but she was not vain. Sabiha tried to think
of her mother with short hair but couldn’t imagine it. Houria was very different from her mother. Sabiha’s mother
was
beautiful. She was sad and beautiful and she had wept when Sabiha left on the bus from outside the post office. Her father had definitely not married his sister’s look-alike. It amused Sabiha to see this anxiety in Houria about her appearance. ‘Why don’t you just go and get it cut,’ she said. ‘If you don’t like it, you can let it grow again.’
Houria patted her hair. ‘Do you really think I should?’ She knew in her heart that to cut her hair short now would be a kind of divorce from Dom. She wanted a divorce from him, was that it? She wanted a divorce from their past.
That
was it. To hope for something good in her future, that was what she wanted now. To set out again. With his death, if she was not to begin living in the past, divorce from the old days with Dom was a necessity. It was very unexpected and she did not quite know what to make of herself for thinking in this way. Was it good or bad? She was not sure. But it excited her and she could not help secretly admiring herself for it. She understood there was a kind of courage in it.
‘It will grow again,’ Sabiha said lightly, setting down the knives and forks again on the red checked cloths. ‘Just get it cut if you want to.
I
would.’
‘Would you really?’ This wasn’t the answer Houria had been hoping for. She wanted enthusiasm from her niece. She said glumly, ‘Dom liked it long.’
Sabiha paused again and they stood looking at each other across the small dining room.
Sabiha wanted to say, Listen, Dom’s dead. Okay? So just get your hair cut if you want to. What’s the difference? She smiled and said nothing. She had never met Dom of course. And there was evidently a complication she did not understand. People were funny. She loved her aunt and didn’t want to say anything that might offend her.
Houria lifted her shoulders. ‘I just don’t know what to do!’
The very first evening Sabiha arrived in Paris, they were standing in the back room upstairs that Houria had prepared for her. It was a sweet little room, under the sloping roof, intimate, safe and homely. A bed with a flowered cover and a hard-backed chair beside the bed, an old black trunk from Dom’s seafaring days pushed up under the slope of the roof to keep her clothes in. A pot of some lovely fragrant spice mixture on the deep windowsill, like a blessing on the air.
Sabiha felt she was wanted. Houria apologised for the lack of a mirror.
‘I’ll get you a mirror, darling, as soon as I have a minute.’ She asked her then if there was something special she wanted to do in Paris.
Sabiha said, ‘I’ve imagined going up the Eiffel Tower and seeing the whole of Paris laid out below me.’
Houria leaned and pointed through the singlepaned window above the bed. ‘See that red light? Way over to the north of us there?’ Sabiha bent to look and their heads touched. ‘That’s the light on the top of the Eiffel Tower.’ They leaned there together, looking out the narrow window into the glowing sky above the great city.
Sabiha said, ‘It’s so beautiful.’ And it was, for there is no more beautiful sight in the whole world than the rooftops of Paris at night.
‘We’ll go together,’ Houria said. ‘I’ve never done it. Dom wasn’t one for the sights.’ Houria kissed Sabiha’s cheek, then straightened and said, ‘I’ve changed my mind about selling the business and going home to El Djem. El Djem’s no longer my home.’ They looked at each other. ‘Yes. I was panicking when I wrote to your father. Dom’s death was such a shock. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was saying or thinking or anything.’ She took Sabiha’s hand and held
it and led her downstairs and into the kitchen, where she set about making hot chocolate for them both. ‘The minute I stopped and faced the reality of going back to Tunisia, I knew
this
was my real home. Paris is where I’ll die.’
‘Don’t say that. You’re never going to die.’
Sabiha was secretly thrilled. She had already decided not to go home unless she was absolutely forced to.
‘This is where my memories are,’ Houria said, looking around the kitchen at the worn pots and pans and the crocks and piles of bowls and old brown
pichets
and wine bottles and all the paraphernalia she and Dom had gathered together over the years. ‘If I went back now, what I’d have would be just those old threadbare childhood memories. I’d be sitting with the old women being a widow, listening to them gossiping about lives and times I know nothing about. What could I say to them? If I went back now, I’d be more alone than I am here. I’d just be waiting to die. Well I’m not ready for that. Not yet.’
Sabiha said. ‘You’re still young, Aunty.’
Houria put her arms around Sabiha and drew her close. ‘You smell wonderful. I’m going to keep you.’
Sabiha went on laying the tables.
‘Get your hair cut this afternoon,’ she said definitely. She liked to see all the knives and forks and the jugs of water and the glasses sitting exactly in their correct places before the men started arriving for their midday meal. She looked around at her handiwork with pride, then back over at Houria.
‘I’ll come with you to the hairdressers and watch. I’ll hold your hand.’
Both women laughed.
Houria said, ‘What would I do without you?’
H
ouria had a far subtler understanding of spices than Dom, which was why her cooking was of another order altogether than his had been. Her secret had been well kept all those years. Her light hidden under a bushel. A necessary modesty in a woman. Now she brought her secrets out and displayed them, and it wasn’t long before the immigrant working men of the district heard about Chez Dom and began to come to the café for their midday meal. With Houria cooking and Sabiha waiting on the tables, the men could speak their Tunisian dialect, and the spicy cooking smells in the café were the smells of home. For an hour in the middle of their working day the men might almost have been with their own wives and daughters. In Chez Dom it was possible to forget the smell of the slaughterhouse. The young men smiled shyly at Sabiha
and were gracious in their manners. The older men followed her with their eyes and thought of their own daughters and were moved by the grace of this young woman from home.
Within a year of the death of Dom Pakos the customers at the café were exclusively North African workmen. There were a few among them who had also managed to start their own small businesses. Chez Dom became their meeting place. Some of them drank wine but many of them did not, so on the whole it was cheaper for Houria to run the café than it had been when all their customers had drunk a good many glasses of wine with their midday meal. As well as this, Houria expanded the business. Her sweet pastries were rapidly becoming famous. She sold them through her friend Sonja at the market and took orders from local shops and businesses. When she wasn’t busy preparing the lunch, Houria was shopping for supplies or cooking sweet pastries. The pastries were a profitable sideline and Sabiha was her willing apprentice in the enterprise. The two of them were always laughing and singing as they worked together in the kitchen of Chez Dom.
‘I will teach you everything,’ Houria told her. ‘For a woman to understand the art of spices is as important as it is for her to understand the arts of love. With
these accomplishments she will never lose her man, even when she loses her youth and her looks. I promise you!’ Sabiha blushed and Houria laughed and kissed her. ‘One day your man will come into your life and you will know him at once. That is how it is. It was like that for Dom and me. It has always been the way of all true love.’
With short hair Houria looked more confident than she ever had before. It was her manner as much as anything. After she had her hair cut she became the dignified
patronne
of the ‘house’ and was no longer just Dom Pakos’s widow carrying on the business as best she could. Now she was her own woman. The position grew on her. She adopted it. She became
someone.
Something in Houria was completed by the death of her husband. Something of herself was released. It took time for her to acknowledge this to herself. But it was true. After Dom’s death she began to have ideas and to put her ideas into practice. And her ideas worked. She was successful. She had not expected any of this and was excited by her success.
Now that the heavy cowpat was gone, Houria’s smile was broader and more generous, and she walked with that lighter step she had envied in other women, catching herself being more happy than she had ever been when her beloved Dom was alive, and needing to
remind herself from time to time that her man’s death must be memorialised with dignity and gratitude in her daily life. Dom had not left
nothing
behind him, after all. It was on the modest foundation of what he had left behind him that she and Sabiha had built their new business. It was different.
Life
was different without him. But Dom was still around. At night he was with her. When she needed him, he
found
her. Dom still had his place in her life. But gradually, day by day, Dom’s influence was becoming subordinate to her realities and she spoke of him less and less often to Sabiha. She never visited his grave. That was not how she wished to remember him.
The workmen who came to eat at the café, Tunisian men who had once been her own people in the distant past, knew nothing of Dom, but she knew. She still slept in their bed at night, didn’t she? And she still talked to him, and made love with him, giving him pleasure and taking her pleasure with him. And while Sabiha slept and dreamed her dreams in the back room with its single-pane window looking out onto the laneway, a distant glimpse of the light winking on the top of a building behind the Montparnasse railway station—which had nothing at all to do with the Eiffel Tower—Houria was still Dom’s princess in the arts of love.
They were happy, these two women. As happy as they could be. It was true, there were times when Houria missed Dom with a sudden chill gust of fear and a sense of helpless loss, as if he called to her from the void. And there were moments when she felt guilty about his death, as if she had lost him through her own neglect. But on the whole she was content that he was gone and she would not have wished him back if she had been given the chance to make such a wish. She had her new life. Her own expanding life. And she had her brother’s beautiful daughter by her side.
‘You are the daughter I never had,’ she told Sabiha.
‘Are you terribly lonely, Aunty?’ Sabiha asked her. The two of them were cuddled up on the green couch in the little sitting room under the stairs, both of them tired from their long day, the blue and yellow flames of the gas fire murmuring comfortingly.
‘I’ve got
you,’
Houria said, kissing Sabiha’s cheek. ‘How could I be lonely?’ She loved the soft feel of Sabiha’s cheeks against her lips. ‘You would have loved my Dom, and he would have loved you. You would have been his daughter too.’
‘Did you never want a child?’ Sabiha asked her shyly. She was curious about Houria’s childlessness, for secretly Sabiha believed herself destined to be a mother and knew she would never be whole as a woman
until she held her own child to her breasts. It was not a man she dreamed of, but a child. She could not imagine a contentment such as Houria’s without a child. Sabiha’s secret child was a comfort to her, it was a warmth, a presence; deep within her, it waited patiently for the moment of its birth. She was sure of it. The child had been there since she was a little girl. The child
was
herself, this inner, secret child of hers. She had spoken of it to no one, not even to her sister Zahira. One day she would have the child with her, and on that day she would become a woman.
‘No, darling. Dom and I were enough for each other. We were both wanderers in this world until the day we met. And from that day we were home for each other.’ She stroked Sabiha’s hair, André's dog barking at the cat in the back lane, the fire hissing and burping. ‘But you will have children,’ Houria said. ‘And you will love them. And they will love you.’ Sabiha snuggled closer and closed her eyes. She loved her aunt’s smell, her touch, her motherly intimacy; Houria’s smell was so very different to her mother’s. It was not a brood of children she wanted but was just one child. Her child. There
was
only one. She knew it without knowing how she knew it.
When Sabiha asked Houria why she and her own mother had originally left Tunisia and come to France
Houria said, ‘Your grandmother needed medical treatment. It wasn’t available in Tunisia at that time.’ She was silent then. ‘That was her official reason for going. My mother’s life was hard. She was not like your other grandmother. My mother was a restless woman. She was always looking for something she never found. She was never happy. She couldn’t find the happiness she was looking for. It’s like that for some people. That’s all there is to it. It’s not a great mystery. Some people are discontented and some people are not.’
As a child Sabiha had been close to her grandmother on her mother’s side, but her grandmother on her father’s side, Houria’s mother, had never been spoken of in the family. No one had ever said ‘your grandmother’ to her before this and meant her
other
grandmother. She would have liked to know more, but felt that Houria did not wish to talk about her childhood alone in Paris with her discontented mother. She said to Houria, ‘Do you think
I’m
discontented?’
Houria laughed. ‘You? No, darling. You’re as contented as a kitten. Life suits you. You’re like me.’
But although she loved her aunt Houria, Sabiha knew in her heart she was not like her. She feared to be discontented. How did you keep such feelings from your mind if they came to you?
Sabiha never spoke of going home to El Djem. She wrote a letter to her mother every week, giving her mother the news in detail, and reassuring her that she was happy and in good health and would come home for a holiday soon. Sabiha knew her father understood that she was never coming home. Perhaps not even for a holiday. How was she to find the time? Her life was going on without them. After little more than a year in Paris she was already not the person she had been when she was living at home in El Djem. She knew her father accepted this. Her father didn’t need reassuring. He didn’t need explanations from her. He knew that people go away and never return. His own mother had done so. And she herself was now moving away from her past at such a speed she could sometimes scarcely recall her old life. She didn’t have the time to think about it. She was going to the market on her own these days, buying the spices Houria required, being initiated by Houria into the mysteries of mixing spices and many other things. She loved her new life with her aunt Houria in Paris. It was too exciting to think of home with regret. Travelling alone on the
métro,
being a young woman walking along the streets of Paris with all the
other people, Houria trusting her and making sure she always had money in her purse. This was her life now. It was a real life. Not the waiting life she had lived at home.
She lay in her bed at night under the sloping roof, looking at the distant light winking in the sky, and she repeated the astonishing claim to herself again and again: ‘I am a young woman living in Paris with my aunt.’ It was a fact. A magical fact. There were a hundred, no, there were a thousand things she was going to do as soon as she had the free time. She was determined to see all the great sights of Paris and to miss nothing. She wanted to know everything.
It is true that there were also times when she would have liked to sit with her father under the pomegranate tree in the courtyard at evening and tell him everything she had seen, and to share with him some of the secret misgivings that stole into her heart at times. She never wrote to him, but sent him and Zahira her news through her regular letters to her mother. She was
too
close to her father to write to him. And he did not write to her either. If they were to write to each other they would write things that could not be shared with her mother and sister. They
knew,
she and her father. That was all they needed
from each other. To know. A time would come when they would need more than this knowing from each other. Then they would ask. Then each would give to the other what was asked.