I said, ‘You left me hanging with your promise to Sabiha never again to ask her to come to Australia.’
He smiled and nodded and said nothing.
I thought about the gulf of years between that day in their bedroom at Chez Dom when he promised Sabiha he would not ask her to go to Australia until her father had seen their child, and this day here now sitting with me in the back of the Paradiso in Carlton. I said, ‘Did you keep your promise?’
He looked up at me slowly, as if he had been making an assessment of something miles away from what I was trying to talk about. Then he met my gaze directly. He said, ‘Houria died, you know.’
I felt the shock of it. That sudden empty space of disbelief death makes where someone has been present, with a life still to be lived.
‘She was a good mate to me through it all.’
I wondered what
through it all
referred to.
His eyes stayed on mine, holding my gaze but looking into me, looking through me, beyond me and into his own past and the death of that fine woman Houria Pakos, who it seemed I was not going to get the chance to mourn. Her death already so long ago. The end of Houria seemed terribly unfair to me. I had been looking forward to knowing her for a long while yet. So that’s what he’d been thinking of: death; his father’s and Houria’s. One death leading to thoughts of another. I had plenty of deaths of my own to think about if I cared to. There were a lot of them out there,
dead friends and intimates. My own ghosts. Easy to love now. I have more dead friends than living ones these days.
‘It took us a while, a month or so I suppose it was, to realise that without Houria the café wasn’t really Chez Dom anymore. The connection with Dom Pakos and their early days had been broken. It wasn’t long after we buried Houria that Sabiha began singing her old songs to the men on Saturday nights. She said she wanted to give them something to remind them of their homes and their wives and children. But in a way, I knew she was really singing for Houria, for that lost connection with her father’s sister, with her own past in El Djem. Like all deaths, Houria’s brought about the end of more than just one life. Houria didn’t have a lot of time for the old songs when she was alive, but somehow being dead made it seem as if she might be able to appreciate them after all.’ He looked at me. ‘All temporal prejudices set aside,’ he said. ‘If you see what I mean.’
I thought I had some idea of what he might mean and said so.
‘Things changed for Sabiha and me after Houria died. It wasn’t just her death. Vaugirard changed too. Even the smells in our lives changed. It all seemed to happen at once. The abattoirs closed, then they started
building a park where the slaughterhouse had been. A year or two later the second-hand book market opened and we began to get the occasional tourist discovering us. After Houria died it seemed as if nothing quite stayed in place. Suddenly she was gone and we were in charge of everything,
forever.
We kept going. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. Perhaps we should have called it a day and come home to Australia then. But we stayed open. It was our only income. And, yes, I’d made my promise, and yes, I kept it. Sabiha didn’t fall pregnant and we stood still, while one year followed another. It was probably my fault. We stopped talking about it. We stopped going to doctors and having tests. We stopped talking about having a child. I thought I was going to end my days in Chez Dom. I probably got a bit depressed and started drinking more than I used to. And I read too much. I hid in my reading. I still do that.’ He laughed. ‘When I climbed into bed beside Sabiha one night after I’d been drinking she told me my smell made me unattractive to her. It was a shock. We were both under a lot of pressure. I felt disgusted with myself for drinking but I was angry with her for saying it to me. I was hurt.’ He looked at me to see if I was listening. He didn’t say anything for a while but sat looking at me, an apologetic smile in his eyes.
‘I didn’t understand Sabiha then. I had no idea really. But that was me
then,’
he said. ‘It’s not me
now
.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course it’s not.’
‘The next day I said something really stupid and hurtful to her. And that one stupid remark seemed to determine the rest of our lives.’ He searched my eyes. ‘Do you know what I mean? Has that ever happened to you? Something like that?’
‘What did you say to her?’ I asked.
My question seemed to make him anxious and he didn’t speak for a while. Then he drew a deep breath. ‘I suppose we’d both reached a point of crisis without realising it. I felt as if I was never going to get home to Australia. I resented her insistence that she had to present her child to her father before we could move on. I didn’t say it to get my own back. I wasn’t trying to hurt her. The pressures on us were all under the surface. We’d stopped talking about what was important to us. Everything had become subterranean and unspoken. It didn’t seem like that to us at the time, of course. It just seemed like one day was following another. But looking back now I can see that’s what happened to us. We still loved each other. We’ve never stopped loving each other. We continued to be gentle and kind to each other. We still wanted to make each other happy.’
He stopped talking suddenly and looked down at his hands, which he spread on the table in front of him, palms down. They were youthful hands. Strong and well shaped and without blemishes. The hands of a younger man. He sat examining them, as if he was proud of his hands. I didn’t prompt him in case he decided to say no more. Confession, after all, even to a relative stranger, such as I was to John, is not always the easiest strategy for absolving ourselves.
He said, ‘It was one of those things we just blurt out without thinking.’ He looked up at me. ‘Sometimes you shift just one small rock and the whole mountain falls on you.’
O
ne Tuesday, a few moments after the last lunchtime customer had left the café, Sabiha came into the dining room from the kitchen carrying her own and John’s lunches. So far there was nothing to distinguish this Tuesday from any other Tuesday in the routine of their lives. Sabiha backed through the bead curtain, pausing to let it slide over her shoulders, then turned and walked across to the table by the window, where John was sitting reading a book. Sabiha stood a moment while John set aside his book, then she put his midday meal on the table in front of him.
John pulled his chair in closer to the table. He looked up. ‘Thank you, darling,’ he said. ‘It smells great.’
She sat across from him, her own meal in front of her.
They began to eat the seared lamb and vegetables, taking a sip of the red wine and reaching for a piece of bread from the bowl in the centre of the table. The delicious smell of a subtle blending of spices rose from the food. Under Houria’s tuition Sabiha had long ago mastered the art of spices. Seated at their usual table by the window, she and John were able to enjoy the distraction of the passing traffic and pedestrians along the narrow confines of rue des Esclaves.
Outside, the autumn day was fine and warm, the street noisy and busy at this time of the day. Across the road, ancient Arnoul Fort was standing in the sunlight in the doorway of his shop as he often did, smoking a cigarette and watching the comings and goings. In their youth Arnoul and his wife Monique had known by name everyone in the district. Now the old man knew scarcely anyone who passed his door. It was to Arnoul that Houria had sent Sabiha long ago to find a matching thread with which to repair the leather patch on the sleeve of John’s jacket. Sabiha had wanted her repairs to be perfect. Although he had not worn the old brown jacket for many years, John had not thrown it away and it still hung on his side of the wardrobe upstairs in their bedroom; the bedroom that had once been Dom and Houria’s, and then Houria’s alone.
For the past three years Bruno Fiorentino had been delivering a box of his hothouse tomatoes to Chez Dom regularly every Tuesday. After he delivered the tomatoes Bruno stayed for the midday meal, which John insisted was on the house. On Tuesdays Bruno was invariably the last customer to leave the café. Today, as usual, just after John and Sabiha began their own meal, Bruno drove past the window in his van hooting his horn and waving his arm to them.
As Bruno’s familiar green and orange van swept past the café, its horn blaring, John looked up from his plate and gestured with his fork out the window. ‘Did you know Bruno’s got eleven kids?’ he said.
Even as he said it, John couldn’t understand why he didn’t resist the impulse to utter these words. How could he be so insensitive? Dismayed, he reached across the table and put his hand over Sabiha’s, apologising to her and expecting to see tears gathering in her beautiful dark eyes.
But instead of weeping, Sabiha withdrew her hand and laughed. It was a loud laugh, more like a cry of dismay and anger than a laugh.
John flinched and stared at her in astonishment.
His timing could hardly have been worse. Since celebrating her thirty-seventh birthday in June, Sabiha had been finding it difficult to accept that she was a
woman nearing forty. It was late September now and another year was already nearly gone. Last Friday morning when she was at the market, she found herself standing stock still murmuring incredulously,
Can this really be me?
She had felt, suddenly, that she was trapped inside the body of an older woman. Inside, where it really mattered, Sabiha knew herself to be the young woman who had fallen in love with John all those years ago. Standing there in the market on Friday, a gust of panic had swept over her and she had seen herself—the young woman, that is—running wildly among the stalls, knocking people aside and tipping over piles of apples and cabbages and … And
what
? There was nothing to be done. Nothing.
Her panic lasted only a moment, but the question remained with her: where had the years gone? For some time she had been feeling haunted by the passing years. She was nearing forty and had only a few years left before the onset of that time that is known, with good reason, as the change of life. What then? It would be the end of her hopes of motherhood. It brought tears to her eyes whenever she thought of the night when she and John first made love. Since then she had learned to live with constant doubt.
When her childlessness persisted, and no cause for it could be found, Sabiha had begun to feel as if a wall
of indifference was being erected around her, cruelly cutting her off from the purpose of her existence, and she asked herself if she was being punished for a crime she had not committed. The injustice of her childlessness burned in her every day. What had she done to deserve it? Her life had surely been blameless. Eventually they had stopped talking with each other about their childlessness. It was too painful. But although she never spoke of it, Sabiha’s determination to bring her little girl into the world had remained as strong as ever. She had never lost hope. One day, she was sure, she would hold her little daughter in her arms. The same child whose existence she had felt fluttering in her belly that summer day as she lay in John’s arms on the bank of the river Eure in Chartres. It was the only child she cared about. It was her little daughter she dreamed of.
When John asked her if she knew Bruno had eleven children, Sabiha had been thinking about her moment of panic in the market on Friday, an image in her mind of the young woman running away from the ageing woman. She stopped eating and looked at him in astonishment. When he placed his hand over hers and said, ‘I’m sorry, darling, that was a really stupid thing to say,’ she wanted to hit him in the face with her plate of food.
She withdrew her hand from his and, instead of hitting him, she laughed. It was the laugh of decades of frustration, injustice and anger. Then she reached for her tumbler of wine.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘He has given her one child for each year of
their marriage!’ And she laughed again, the same loud, coarse laugh that was not her laugh but was the laugh of some other, fiercer woman than she. She drank all the wine in her glass and set the empty tumbler on the table. She sat a moment, her fingers gripping the empty glass as if it were a grenade and she was considering tossing it through the window, or at John’s head. Then she looked at him and smiled.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was unnerved by the peculiar smile on her face.
She said, ‘Bruno’s is a perfect score, John!’
It seemed to him that Sabiha said this with a malicious emphasis. It was so unlike her he didn’t know what to say. Perhaps it
was
his fault. They would probably never know. Sabiha was waiting for him to say something. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Is it, or isn’t it?’
‘Bruno and Angela have been married a good few years longer than we have, darling,’ he said, trying to make it sound as if everything was normal between them. ‘Eleven is not nearly one child for each year of their marriage. It’s a lot of kids, but it’s not a perfect score.’
‘You can be so pedantic,’ she said, as if the thought fatigued her.
His mind had gone blank when she gave that dreadful laugh. The laugh had made him feel lonely.
‘Eleven! Fifteen! Twenty!’ Sabiha said, as if she might howl or burst into tears or strike him in the face if he said another word, her patience exhausted. ‘What difference does it make? Bruno’s is
a perfect score,
John! Face it!’
She reached for the jug and refilled her tumbler with the red wine. She lifted it to her lips and took a long drink, then set the glass back on the table with exaggerated care.
Now
there were tears in her eyes. A pin had come loose and Sabiha’s hair had fallen forward over her face. She raised her hand and pushed it back.
John wanted to take her in his arms and tell her:
Somehow, one day, my darling, you will have your child. I promise you, with my life, with all I am and all I have, I promise you, you will have your child.
But of course he could promise her nothing of the sort.
‘You’re right,’ he said meekly. ‘Yes, you’re right.’ He sat gazing unhappily at the food on his plate, unable
to look up and meet her eyes. He felt guilty, wronged, unhappy and alone. He could think of nothing to say.
With exacting deliberation he cut a small piece of lamb and speared it on his fork, lifted the fork to his mouth and put the meat in his mouth and chewed it. Sabiha was still looking at him. His mouth was dry and he realised he was not going to be able to swallow the lump of meat. He chewed on the thing and looked out at the street. The afternoon sun was reflected in the window of the Kavi boys’ grocery store on the corner, the mean building opposite transformed into a golden temple. Sabiha had never called him John before. Not even in the earliest days of their life together. He had always been dearest, or darling, or my love, or my Hercules. My hero. Even my lovely Aussie man. Never John. Despite everything, he felt he was in the right.
He reached for his glass and washed down the dreadful thing in his mouth. He felt it go down his gullet and thought of his old dog, Tip, golloping a piece of raw meat, the gulping sound of it going down her throat. The wine was hard and cold and acid on his palate. His usual supplier was taking him for granted. He had known it for some time, but had preferred not to make a fuss. He knew they called him the quiet Australian. And he was. He prided himself on being easy to get along with. He liked to be liked. He
decided to put up with the poor quality of the wine no longer. He would have it out with the wine merchant this afternoon.
When John said nothing, Sabiha gave a small exasperated laugh and took up her knife and fork and went on with her meal.
Minutes passed, the silence broken only by the click and scrape of cutlery against their plates. Behind them the empty tables of the dining room. Beside them the familiar faded green of the timber trim around the window and door, last painted by John almost ten years ago, when Houria was still alive.
The telephone began to ring.
Sabiha put down her knife and fork and got up from the table, and went behind the bar and lifted the receiver. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sabiha speaking.’
In a voice she scarcely recognised, so hollow and faded was it from its former confident manliness, her father said, ‘It’s what you’ve been expecting, my dearest child. I have cancer.’ He laughed. It was a throaty, subdued laugh that remained in his chest.
Sabiha understood from her father’s laugh that it amused him to greet the cancer as a messenger come at last to deliver him from the burden of his life, and that he did not resent too greatly the knowledge that
he was soon to die. She was swept by a gust of grief and anger.
He told her he loved her and said he hoped she would be able to visit him soon. He added, ‘But only if you and John are not too busy.’ She replied that of course she would come over and spend some time with him. She did not say,
To wait for the end with you.
But they both understood this was what she meant. There was a silence. She heard the roar of a motor in the background and asked, ‘Is that the Tunis bus?’
Yes, he told her, the bus had just pulled away.
She saw the old green and yellow bus driving away from the front of the post office, its exhaust belching black smoke, her own face pressed to the window, leaving her home for Paris, her hand raised in farewell to her mother and sister and to her beloved father. She could smell the exhaust in the muggy heat of an autumn morning at home.
‘Did you walk up to the post office on your own?’
He told her he had done so.
She asked after her sister, Zahira.
He told her, ‘Zahira is well and is taking good care of me. It will be hard for her here on her own when I’m gone.’
After she had spoken with her father, Sabiha came back to the table and sat down. She did not go on
with her meal but sat looking out at the sunny street. The lamb and baked aubergine and spicy stuffed tomatoes on her plate had gone cold. She was seeing her father returning from making his telephone call along the dusty road to their old home in El Djem. In her imagination she watched him struggle with the hasp of the iron gate, as he had always struggled with the troublesome thing. When he had the gate open, she watched him cross the narrow courtyard to the house, knowing his every faltering step, seeing him duck his head and put out his hand to steady himself as he passed under the low branches of the pomegranate tree, where his chickens roosted at night, beside his patch of vegetables. The door to the house opened before he reached it. Zahira was waiting for him in the cool interior. Sabiha watched her father sit in his chair and take in his hand the glass of mint tea Zahira offered him. Sabiha thought of her father’s name for her, The Difficult One, as if that person was her truest self. His boast that she was the one who had married a foreigner and escaped the poverty of El Djem to live in Paris. He had always been her champion. He was proud of her. He was her hero. The last time he had telephoned her had been almost five years ago to tell her of her mother’s sudden death. How quickly those five years had gone by.
She straightened and looked out the window at the street, where Bruno of the perfect score had passed a moment earlier. And she knew, with sudden understanding that made her draw in her breath sharply—so that John looked at her quickly—how fragile and brief the span of a person’s life was. Her father, who had always been there, was soon to be there no more. The
forever
of her childhood was no longer forever.
She turned to John. She had spoken to her father in Arabic. ‘It was my father,’ she said. There was anger as well as sorrow in her voice. ‘He’s managed to give himself lung cancer at last.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Is there anything they can do for him?’
She got up and collected their plates and the cutlery.
‘Are you all right, darling?’ he asked.
She stood a moment looking down at John. She wanted to say, Of course I’m not all right! What do you think? All you’re thinking about now is going home to Australia the minute my father dies. I know that. His death will be a relief for you. Well I’m not going to be defeated. I’m not giving up. I will still place my little daughter in my father’s arms before he dies. You’ll see!